knb comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong

17 Post author: diegocaleiro 06 May 2013 05:34AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 May 2013 08:49:31AM -2 points [-]

This experiment is totally irrelevant to the disagreement between Diego and myself. Diego is claiming that making yourself have more sex--including sex you would otherwise be reluctant to have--will make you happier. He says he knows this because of some conjecture based on an ev-psych just-so story. Your experiment tests whether forcing people not to have sex they already do want to have will make them less happy. Do you not understand the difference?

If having epsilon much less sex would make us less happy, then having epsilon much more sex would make us happier, unless we are at exactly the local optimum, which sounds unlikely a priori.

Comment author: knb 12 May 2013 05:21:09PM *  1 point [-]

If having epsilon much less sex would make us less happy, then having epsilon much more sex would make us happier, unless we are at exactly the local optimum, which sounds unlikely a priori.

Asr is right, but it actually goes so much further than this.... You have also entirely failed to account for opportunity cost. You aren't just adding some epsilon of sex, you're subtracting from some other area of life to have more time for sex.

And these are just the abstract, theoretical problems with your suggestion. The real-world practical problems of adding more sex are enormous... There are serious bottlenecks to sex. Both partners have to be in the mood or the act has potentially serious negative utility. Synchronizing desire takes a lot of time and effort. (It takes much more than a minute of romance time to yield a minute of sex.)