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MugaSofer comments on Ritual 2012: A Moment of Darkness - Less Wrong
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Well, it depends what you mean by "defining value". The LW community includes all sorts of stuff that simply becomes much more convincing/obvious/likely when you're, well, more rational. Atheism, polyamory, cryonics ... there's quite a few of these beliefs floating around. That seems like it's as it should be; if rationality didn't cause you to change your beliefs, it would be meaningless, and if those beliefs weren't better correlated with reality, it would be useless.
As of now, there is no evidence that the average LessWronger is more rational than the average smart, educated person (see the LW poll). Therefore, a lot of LWers thinking something is not any stronger evidence for its truth than any other similarly-sized group of smart, educated people thinking it. Therefore, until we get way better at this, I think we should be humble in our certainty estimates, and not do mindhacky things to cement the beliefs we currently hold.
Who said anything about mindhacking? I'm just saying that we should expect rationalists to believe some of the same things, even if nonrationalists generally don't believe these things. Considering the whole point of this site is to help people become more rational, recognize and overcome their biases etc. I'm not sure what you're doing here if you don't think that actually, y'know, happens.
Raemon did. It's a ritual, deliberately styled after religious rituals, some of the most powerful mindhacks known.
I ... didn't get the impression that this was intended to mindhack people into moving closer to LessWrong consensus.
Oh, sorry, neither did I. I'm not trying to accuse Raemon of deliberate brainwashing. But getting together every year to sings songs about, say, existential risk will make people more likely to disregard evidence showing that X-risk is lower than previously thought. Same for every other subject.
Ah, I guess it was the use of "deliberately" that confused me. Now I come to think of it, this is mentioned as a possible risk in the article, and dismissed as much less powerful than, y'know, talking about it all the damn time.
I'm especially intrigued that you list polyamory among the beliefs that become more "convincing/obvious/likely" with greater rationality. Just to clarify: on your view, is the fact that I have no particular desire to have more than one lover in my life evidence that I am less rational than I would be if I desired more lovers? Why ought I believe that?
Not speaking for them, but what I do actually think is that there is some portion of the population that would gravitate towards polyamory, but don't because of cached thinking, so increasing rationality would increase the number of polyamorous people.
It came up in conversation with my second cousin today that I have four boyfriends who all know about each other and get along and can have as many girlfriends as they want. My second cousin had never heard of anything like this, but it sounded immediately sensible and like a better way of doing things to him. Just being in a position to learn that an option exists will increase your odds of doing it.
Well, sure; I agree.
Let me put it this way: it's one thing to say "some people like X, some people don't like X, and rationalists are more likely to consider what they actually want and how to achieve it without giving undue weight to social convention." It's a different thing to say "rational people like X, and someone's stance towards X is significant evidence of their rationality."
This community says the second thing rather unambiguously about X=cryonics and X=atheism. So when cryonics, atheism, and polyamory are grouped together, that seems like significant evidence that the second thing is also being said about X=polyamory.
So I figured it was worth clarifying.
I agree. I wouldn't have worded the original comment that way.
They really aught not to, though, Living forever, like polyamory, is a preference which hinges strictly on a person's utility function. It's perfectly possible for a rational agent to not want to live forever, or be polyamorous.
Even if someone considers polyamory and cryonics morally wrong... in this community we often use rational and bayesian interchangeably, but let's revert to the regular definition for a moment. People who condemn polyamory or cryonics based on cached thoughts are not rational in the true English sense of the word (rational - having reason or justification for belief) but they are not any less epistemically bayesian...it's not like they have a twisted view of reality itself.
Atheism...well that's a proposition about the truth, so you could argue that it says something about the individual's rationality. Trouble is, since God is so ill defined, atheism is poorly defined by extension. So you'd get someone like Einstein claiming not to be an atheist on mostly aesthetic grounds.
Because of our semantic idiocy atheism implies adeism as well, even though deists, atheists, and pantheists have otherwise identical models about observable reality...so I'd hesitate to say that deism/pantheism imply irrationality.
Edit: Also, let's not confuse intelligence with bayesian-ness. Intelligence correlates with all the beliefs mentioned above largely because it confers resistance to conformity, and that's the real reason that polyamory and atheism is over-represented at lesswrong. Cryonics...I think that's a cultural artifact of the close affiliation with the singularity institute.
Regarding polyamory, it could also be founder effect — given that several of the top contributors are openly poly, that both men and women are among them, and so on.
Alicorn used to be mono, and I think so did Eliezer; and the fraction of poly respondents was about the same in the last two surveys, which... some part of my brain tells me is evidence against your hypothesis, but now that I think about it I'm not sure why.
But we're talking about probability, not possibility. It's possible for a mammal to be bipedal; but evidence for quadrupedalism is still evidence for being a mammal. Similarly, it's possible to be irrational and polyamorous; but if the rate of polyamory is greater among rationalists than among non-rationalists, then polyamory is evidence of rationality, regardless of whether it directly causally arises from any rationality-skill. The same would be true if hat-wearing were more common among rationalists than among non-rationalists. It sounds like you're criticizing a different attitude than is TheOtherDave.
But those are only different if your 'significant' qualifier in 'significant evidence' is much stronger than your 'more likely' threshold. In other words, the difference is only quantitative. If the rate of polyamory is significantly higher among rationalists than among non-rationalists, then that's it; the question is resolved; polyamory just is evidence of rationality. This is so even if nearly all polyamorous people are relatively irrational. It's also so even if polyamory is never itself a rational choice; all that's required is a correlation.
EDIT: Suppose, for instance, that there are 20 rationalists in a community of 10,020; and 2 of the rationalists are polyamorous; and 800 of the non-rationalists are polyamorous. Then, all else being equal, upon meeting a poly person P a perfect Bayesian who knew the aforementioned facts would need to strongly update in favor of P being a rationalist, even knowing that only 2 of the 802 poly people in the community are rationalists.
Yup, all of that is certainly true.
Similarly, there is likely some number N such that my weight being in or above the Nth percentile of the population is evidence of rationality (or of being a rationalist; the terms seem to be being used interchangeably here).
So, I started out by observing that there seemed to be a property that cryonics and atheism shared with respect to this community, which I wasn't sure polyamory also shared, which is why I made the initial comment.
I was in error to describe the property I was asking about as being primarily about evidence, and I appreciate you pointing that out.
In retrospect, I think what I'm observing is that within this community atheism and cryonics have become group markers of virtue, in a way that having a weight above the abovementioned Nth percentile is not a group marker of virtue (though it may be very strong evidence of group membership). And what I was really asking was whether polyamory was also considered a group marker of virtue.
Looking at the flow of this discussion (not just in this branch) and the voting patterns on it, I conclude that yes, it is.
We also have to be careful again about whether by 'mark of virtue' we mean an indicator of virtue (because polyamory might correlate with virtue without being itself virtuous), or whether by 'mark of virtue' we mean an instance of virtue.
In other words, all of this talk is being needlessly roundabout: What we really want to know, I think, is whether polyamory is a good thing. Does it improve most people's lives? How many non-polyamorous people would benefit from polyamory? How many non-polyamorous people should rationally switch to polyamory, given their present evidence? And do people (or rationalists) tend to accept polyamory for good reasons? Those four questions are logically distinct.
Perhaps the last two questions are the most relevant, since we're trying to determine not just whether polyamorous people happen to win more or be rationalists more often, but whether their polyamory is itself rationally motivated (and whether their reasons scale to the rest of the community). So I think the question you intend to ask is whether polyamorous people (within the LessWrong community, at a minimum) have good reason to be polyamorous, and whether the non-polyamorous people have good reason to be non-polyamorous.
This question is very analogous to the sort of question we could ask about cryonics. Are the LessWrongers who don't want to be frozen being irrational -- succumbing to self-deception, say? Or are the more cryonics-happy LessWrongers being irrational? Or are they both being rational, and they just happen to have different core preferences?
I agree that "whether polyamory (or cryonics, or whatever) is a good thing" is a thing we want to know. Possibly even the thing we really want to know, as you suggest.
When you unpack the question in terms of improving lives, benefiting people, etc. you're implicitly adopting a consequentialist stance, where "is polyamory a good thing" equates to "does polyamory have the highest expected value"? I endorse this completely.
In my experience, it has a high positive expected value for some people and a high negative expected value for others, and the highest EV strategy is figure out which sort of person I am and act accordingly.
This is very similar to asking whether a homosexual sex life has the highest expected value, actually, or (equivalently) whether a homosexual sex life is a good thing: it definitely is for some people, and definitely is not for others, and the highest-EV strategy is to pick a sex life that corresponds to the sort of person I am.
All of that said, I do think there's a difference here between unpacking "is polyamory a good thing?" as "does polyamory has the highest expected value?" (the consequentialist stance) and unpacking it as "is polyamory the a characteristic practice of virtuous people?" (the virtue-ethicist stance).
Perhaps what I mean, when I talk about markers of virtue, is that this community seems to be adopting a virtue-ethics rather than a consequentialist stance on the subject.
Of course, if polyamory turns out to be the best thing for almost all people, or at least lesswrongers, then a consequentialist would behave the same way.
Also true.
Do you believe polyamory is the best thing for almost all people? (Or at least lesswrongers?)
I know how a consequentialist (at least, one operating with the intention of maximizing 'human values') would unpack these questions, and I know how we could theoretically look at facts and give answers to ze's questions.
But how, on earth, would "is polyamory the characteristic of virtuous people" get unpacked? What does "virtuous" mean here and what would it look like for something or someone to be "virtuous"?
I know you probably didn't mean to get dragged into a conversation about Virtue Ethics, but I've seen it mentioned on LW a few times and have always been very curious about its local version.
Well, not being a virtue ethicist myself, I'm probably not the best guy to ask.
My question for virtue ethicists is "well, OK, but how do you tell who is virtuous?"
Then again, a virtue ethicist can just as reasonably ask "well, OK, but how do you tell what consequences are desirable?" to which I, as a consequentialist, essentially reply "I consult my intuitions about value." Life has more value than death, joy has more value than suffering, growth has more value than stagnation, and so forth. How do I know that? Geez, I dunno. I just know.
Presumably a virtue ethicist can just as readily reply "I consult my intuitions about virtue." I suppose it's no less reasonable.
We agree on the higher-level points, so as we pivot toward object-level discussion and actually discuss polyamory, I insist that we begin by tabooing 'polyamory,' or stipulating exactly what we mean by it. For instance, by 'Polyamory is better than monamory for most people.' we might mean:
More generally, we can distinguish between 'preference polyamory' (which I like to call polyphilia: the preference for, or openness to, having multiple partners, whether or not one actually has multiple partners currently) and 'behavioral polyamory' (which I call multamory: the actual act of being in a relationship with multiple people). We can then cut it even finer, since dispositions and behaviors can change over time. Suppose I have a slight preference for monamory, but am happy to be in poly relationships too. And, even more vexingly, maybe I've been in poly relationships for most of my life, but I'm currently in a mono relationship (or single). Am I 'polyamorous'? It's just an issue of word choice, but it's a complex one, and it needs to be resolved before we can evaluate any of these semantic candidates utilitarianly.
And even this is too coarse-grained, because it isn't clear what exactly it takes to qualify as a 'romantic/sexual' partner as opposed to an intimate friend. Nor is it clear what it takes to be a 'partner;' it doesn't help that 'sexual partner' has an episodic character in English, while 'romantic partner' has a continuous character.
As for virtue ethics: In my experience, ideas like 'deontology,' 'consequentialism,' and 'virtue ethics' are hopeless confusions. The specific kinds of arguments characteristic of those three traditions are generally fine, and generally perfectly compatible with one another. There's nothing utilitarianly unacceptable about seriously debating whether polyamory produces good character traits and dispositions.
That seems too complex.
Are people happier, for the most part and all other things being equal, having multiple romantic parters, having single romantic partners, or is there too much variation between individuals to generalize?
Dave seems to be saying that there's too much individual variation to generalize. I don't think I can answer the question, because I don't know how to work out all other things being equal: right now it seems to me that lack of social acceptance makes polyamory a pretty bad choice for most people, even if they are inclined towards it. It very seriously limits the number of people you can have relationships with, for example.
I should note that my original question wasn't (and wasn't intended to be) about polyamory, but rather about MugaSofer's categorizations (and indirectly about LW's). So from my perspective, I have been having an object-level discussion, give or take.
But, OK, if you want to actually discuss polyamory, I'm OK with that too.
Were I to taboo "polyamory", I would unpack it as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. I would similarly taboo "monamory" (were such a term in common usage) as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with exactly one person at a time.
(And, sure, as you say, we can further drill down into this by exploring what "romantic" means, and how it differs from intimate friendship. And for that matter what "person" means and what a "practice" is and what it means to "maintain" a "relationship" and so forth, if we want.)
So by "Polyamory is better than monamory for most people." I would mean that the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time is better than the practice of maintaining them with one person at a time, for most people.
And I would also say that someone who is currently involved in romantic relationships with no more than one person is not currently engaging in polyamory, though that's not to say that they haven't in the past nor that they won't in the future. And someone currently involved in romantic relationships with no people is not engaging in monamory either.
The difference between the unpackings you propose seem to have nothing to do with different understandings of "polyamory" or "monamory", but rather with different understandings of "better".
I would probably unpack "polyamorous" as applied to a person either as preferring romantic relationships with more than one person at a time or as requiring romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. I don't really care which meaning gets used but it's important to agree or conversations tend to derail. (Similar issues arise with whether "homosexual" is understood to exclude people attracted to the opposite sex. Both usages are common, but it's difficult to talk about homosexuality clearly if we don't know which usage is in play.)
Two more points:
It's possible for a trait to be strong evidence both for extreme rationality and for extreme irrationality. (Some traits are much more commonly held among the extremely reasonable and the extremely unreasonable than among 'normals;' seriously preparing for apocalyptic scenarios, for instance. Perhaps polyamory is one of these polarizing traits.)
Sometimes purely irrational behaviors are extremely strong evidence for an agent's overall rationality.
Nitpick: while a significant fraction of rational people are not polyamorous, polyamory could still be better evidence for rationality than atheism. That's because there is so much atheists around, many of which became atheists for the wrong reasons (being raised as such, rebellion…).
Let's try some math with a false dichotomy approximation: someone could be Rational (or not), pOlyamorous (or not), and Atheist (or not). We want to measure how much evidence pOlyamory and Atheism are evidence for Rationality, given Background information B. Those are:
Now imagine that B tells the following: "Among the 6 billion people on Earth, about 1 billion are atheists, 10 millions are rational, and 1 million is polyamorous. Every rational people are atheists, and 5% of them are polyamorous".
So:
Applying the two formulas above, Atheism gives about 8 decibels of evidence for rationality. Polyamory on the other hand, gives about 28. And rationality itself, P(R|B), starts at about -28. pOlyamory is enough to seriously doubt the irRationality of someone, while Atheism doesn't even raise it above the "should think about it" threshold.
If this is not intuitive, keep in mind that according to B, only 1% of Atheists are Rational, while a whooping 50% of pOlyamorous people are. Well, with those made up numbers anyway. Real numbers are most probably less extreme than that. But I still expect to find more rationalists among a polyamorous sample than among an atheist sample.
Yes, that's true.
My reply to Robb elsewhere in this thread when he made a similar point is relevant here as well.
Well, I'm not especially poly myself, but it seems to me rationalists are more likely to look at monogamy and seriously consider the possibility it's suboptimal.
More likely than the typical person on the street? Sure, agreed. As are contrarians, I'd expect.
Yup. Just like technophiles are more likely to embrace the Singularity.
BTW, there are plenty of monogamists who think it's immoral for anyone to have a sexual relationship with someone without also committing to not have sex with anyone else, whereas I'd guess there aren't many poly people who think it's immoral for other people to have monogamous relationships.
How many monogamists hold such opinions but not due to religiosity (or the unexamined remnants of former religiosity)?
Well, quite a lot aren't aware of the existence of polyamory at all. If they think that a person who's in a sexual relationship with someone would necessarily feel betrayed if they knew that person was also having sex with someone else, they would be likely to consider it immoral even without a religious basis.
Numerically, though, I have no idea.
I dunno -- but if you mean “the unexamined remnants of former religiosity” on a societal level¹ rather than on an individual level, then I guess that's the main reason for the overwhelming majority of such people to hold such opinions. There might also be a few people who know that monogamy can curb the spread of STDs and lack a clear distinction between terminal and instrumental values, and/or (possibly incorrectly²) believe that monogamy is “natural” (i.e. it was the norm in the EEA) and commit the naturalistic fallacy, though.
i.e., a society used to have a memeplex, originating from religion, which included the idea that “one can only (romantically) love one person at a time”; that society has since shed most of that memeplex, but not that particular idea, which is still part of the intersubjective truth -- even among individuals who were never religious in the first place.
“Possibly” meaning that I don't know myself, because I haven't looked into that yet -- not that I've seen all the available evidence and concluded it doesn't definitely point one way or another.
I suspect it depends somewhat on how I phrase the question.
Even in my own American urban poly-friendly subculture, I expect a significant percentage of poly folk would agree that there exist a great many monogamous relationships right now that are immoral, which would not be immoral were they polygamous, because they involve people who ought to be/would be happier if they were/are naturally polygamous. I'm not sure what numbers they'd put around "many", though. I know several who would put it upwards of 50%, but I don't know how representative they are.
I therefore suspect that some (but I don't know how many) of them would, if they were coherent about their understanding of evidence, reluctantly agree that being in a monogamous relationship is evidence of immorality.
But I agree that there are few if any poly folk who would agree (other than as a signaling move) that monogamous relationshjps are definitionally immoral.
That's pretty silly. The suffering from jealousy and the stress of having to think through all those difficult issues would make polyamory a net loss for many people.
If you wanted to put them down, you might have a case for calling such people weak or stupid for being unable to deal with emotions or think about these issues...or you might say that they are wise, and they are picking their battles and investing those emotional/intellectual resources into things that matter more to them.
Of course, I think you'd be completely justified in calling the belief that polyamory is immoral as a utilitarian net evil.
This sounds true, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to my comment beyond my use of the word "polyamory".
I think I wanted to show how people who are monogamous usually are because of a cached belief, whereas people who are polyamorous usually are because they've thought about both possibilities and concluded one is better.
Ah. Very true.
Then you failed. Consider the following variant of your argument:
"there are plenty of non child molesters who think it's immoral for any adult to have a sexual relationship with a child, whereas I'd guess there aren't many child molesters who think it's immoral for other adults to have relationships exclusively with adults."
"I think I wanted to show that people who are not child molesters usually are because of a cached belief, whereas people who are child molesters usually are because they've thought about both possibilities and concluded one is better."
That's distressingly convincing.
Why was that downvoted to -2? Technically that's correct (though by “show” I didn't mean ‘rigorously prove’, I meant ‘provide one more piece of evidence’ -- but yeah, the second paragraph of your comment is evidence for the third, though priors are different in the two cases).
"Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass."
I don't think so. The existence of a widespread moral prohibition against some uncommon behavior, which is not matched by a claim of immorality of the typical behavior by those who defend the uncommon behavior, is not evidence that the widespread moral prohibition is a "cached belief" (that is, a meme maintaned only due to tradition and intellectual laziness). People in the majority group could well have pondered the uncommon behavior and decided they had good reason to consider it immoral.
Let A(X) = “There are plenty of non X-ers who think it's immoral for anyone to X, whereas there aren't many X-ers who think it's immoral for other people to refuse to X.”
Let B(X) = “People who are non-X-ers usually are because of a cached belief, whereas people who are X-ers usually are because they've thought about both possibilities and concluded one is better.”
Are you really saying that log(P(A(X)|B(X))/P(A(X)|¬B(X))) ≤ 0? or do you just mean that while positive it is very small? Because I really can't see how A(X) can be more likely given ¬B(X) than given B(X).
Yes, for reasons that have already been described, but it's weak evidence, and other things you know about yourself presumably screen it off.