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DanArmak comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong
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I understood all of that, you were quite clear about this in your post. You think that the danger of sex is biological and that this has been vanquished by vaccines, condoms, etc. In reality, most of the power of sex to harm is social, emotional, and psychological. You are feigning expertise, without even considering the emotional, psychological, and social ramifications. It is pretty common to see this kind of shallow, hyper-atomistic (not considering ramifications upon society), reasoning on Less Wrong.
There is substantial evidence that sexually promiscuous people (distinct from people who have frequent sex) are less happy. It is also a fact that married people have more sex (and more varied sex) than demographically comparable singles. Since married people are also significantly happier and report better health, it seems likely that it is not sex *itself that causes people to be happy, but rather that people who are in stable, happy relationships are also having more sex. Yet your post instead argues that people should just have more sex (including casual sex with strangers, multiple partners, etc.), ignoring the vital element of being in a stable, long-term relationship--in spite of the fact that promiscuity actually is associated with lower happiness. This is inexcusable. Do not give advice about topics when you have such a shallow understanding.
I think what diegocaleiro is saying is that these social and emotional factors are adaptations that evolved due to the biological dangers. Now that the biological dangers are mostly gone, the adaptations are unnecessary and even harmful. So inasfar as we can consciously influence the social and psychological factors, we would benefit from changing them to promote more sex.
So are the adaptations that make sex as pleasurable as it is.
Yes, but our goals are not the goals of evolution. I want to keep sex pleasurable; I don't want to keep it emotionally and socially complicated and discouraged.
See my more detailed discussion here.
Replied there.
Thanks Dan, you made the Evolutionary Heuristic Point very clear in this and other comments!
I think that the insofar is probably not, in fact, very far. The psychological mechanisms built up around sex predate the human species, they're not going to change so easily.
Plus, if increasing promiscuity doesn't make psychologically modern humans happier, why focus on changing the psychology of modern humans to like being more promiscuous? Aren't we privileging the question with respect to sex here? Why not spend that time and effort focusing on making people enjoy cheaper, more sustainably produced foods? How about changing our standards of humor so it's easier to satisfy people with cheesy sitcoms? Is making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful psychological alteration we could be making?
Well, other humans societies are known to be more relaxed and permissive about sex than the modern Western world. And that's without effective contraception. So we clearly can improve somewhat.
No. But down that road lies the argument of "invest all your effort in the single most efficient charity to the exclusion of everything else". Most people don't actually do this, so it makes sense to talk about other things too.
The suggestion here is that making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful alteration we could be making with regard to promiscuity. Maybe one of the most helpful alterations with regard to sex in general.
Really, since most of the societies I can think of are a lot more restrictive.
Most are, but some (few?) are more permissive. I can't remember the right examples, though; I could find them if you're not aware of any examples.
Does it make them happier? How do we know this actually constitutes an improvement?
ETA: We would have evolved different psychological mechanisms around sex if the biological and ecological conditions around it had been different millions of years ago, but those psychological mechanisms are adaptations for our genetic continuation, not our happiness. Just because we've got safer, lower consequence access to sex than in our ancestral environment, does not necessarily mean we'd be happier if we adapted to use that access to a fuller extent.
We don't want to go down the road of "invest your money in the Society for Prevention of Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies" either. Lots of people do that, but that doesn't make it sensible.
By listening to the people who tried it?
Possible selection bias.
There's a big difference between becoming polyamorous and simply increasing promiscuity. The people who wrote those are in stable relationships with people they're happy with. Neither was in such a relationship prior to polyhacking.
People have claimed that religion is part of human nature, too, and yet nowadays a very large fraction of the population in Europe and Japan is non-religious. How sure are you that the chain can still hold you? BTW, the regular LWers who wrote about switching to polyamory don't seem to regret that.
A large fraction of the population in Europe and Japan may not be members of organized religion, but (from personal experience in Europe, secondhand in Japan,) they still engage in plenty of tribal and faith-based reasoning.
This is something I do think can be changed, but with very great difficulty. Similarly the mechanisms around sex, but those are probably a great deal older, and likely even more entrenched.
You can see my other comment re: polyhacking. On an added note, I find it doubtful that the entire population would find it effective. Some people are dramatically more afflicted by sexual jealousy than others. Similarly, some people have reported a measure of success with bi-hacking, but when I tried it it simply didn't work.
I know that most educated people believe that, but I've never seen a good argument for it.
At any rate I am almost sure that there are microbes causing significant amounts of death and disability (especially disability because it is a lot easier for our civilization to ignore or deny a cause of disability than to ignore a cause of deaths) that almost no one recognizes as pathogenic. And I tend to believe that for some significant fraction of these "insufficiently recognized" pathogens the more sexual partners you have, and the more likely you'll get it. (There are dozens of viral and bacterial infections -- including near a dozen at least in the herpes family -- that remain in the body and are more common in more promiscuous populations.)
In other words, there seems to be a strong selection bias whereby people tend to look only at the pathogens that are recognized as pathogens by, e.g., doctors.
It might be however that these biological dangers from less-recognized sexually-transmitted pathogens are concentrated in people who are old or already sick.
Any professional biologists or medical researchers wish to chime in?
I'm not a medical professional either, but...
Except in the specific cases of microbes that target the immune response, wouldn't you expect to see things like an elevated white blood cell count in patients suffering from a pathogen, even if the specific pathogen was not well recognized or understood? In other words, you would see the symptom in a blood test even if you didn't know exactly how to look for the pathogen.
If the pathogen reproduces slowly (the pathogen that causes TB might be one such) or has some way of hiding from the immune system or is one of those viruses (e.g., the herpes family) that get into cells and tend to remain dormant for long intervals, then they can be very hard to detect and will certainly not show up in a WBC. I saw news reports earlier this year about evidence that some cases of obesity are caused by gut microbes not previously regarded by, e.g., doctors and society as being pathogenic.
The biggest biological danger of casual sex was (to women) unwanted pregnancy. It's now almost gone thanks to modern contraception.
STDs certainly exist, but they too have become rarer. Syphilis used to cause a lot of mortality and disability, and was mostly (not entirely) defeated by antibiotics. And with modern health care and social safety nets, if you do get sick, your outlook is much better than even a century ago.