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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong
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Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances. In the general population many naturally poly people are 'conformed' into being mono the same way they might be conformed into being religious. Thus 'people who want to be poly can be' would reasonably be expected to correlate with elements of the Correct Contrarian Cluster, and you would expect to find more polyamorous atheists or (he predicted more boldly) polyamorous endorsers of no-collapse quantum mechanics than in the general population, even outside LW. There are also specifically cognitive-rationality skills like 'resist Asch's conformity' and 'be Munchkin', and community effects like 'Be around people who will listen with interest to long chains of reasoning instead of immediately shunning you.'
When you say 'naturally', are you referring to genetics, prenatal environment, or something else?
How should I know?
You could've read some papers on the topic for example. (I'm answering this because it is after all in the stupid questions thread)
Fair enough.
I apologize if I misinterpreted your statement:
I was curious what was meant by this.
It's likely that Eliezer isn't tending towards either side of the nature vs. nurture debate, and as such isn't claiming that nature or nurture is doing the work in generating preferences.
One wonders if in the populations of rationalists (CFAR in particular) that there are naturally mono people who are 'conformed' into being poly?
I would expect the answer to be "Yes, but with open discussion rather than social pressure, when one partner would prefer a monogamous relationship with someone who self-identifies as poly." See http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/
What's the source of this claim? I hadn't heard that until today.
I would say that's a typical case of an antiprediction. Humans differ in all sorts of things (IQ, height, sexual orientation), so why shouldn't they differ in relationship-preferences?
seems to mean something other than
I took the 'naturally' to just mean that there was some sort of subconscious inclination.
Personal observation. Since the topic is deeply important to the mental health and happiness of a large fraction of the entire human population but sounds slightly silly, I would not particularly expect any significant experiments to have been done by academic science. Surveys of percentage actually practicing polyamory, yes, attempts to directly determine a wish / tendency / suitability in a general population, no.
This is falsifiable if Carl or Jonah want to check cynicism, though I wouldn't be too surprised (the Kinsey Institute exists).
.. I would also expect this to be a low-research area, but not due to sounding silly, but rather due to high-noise datasets. People lie about their sexual desires a lot. This particular desire is even more likely to be denied or concealed from researchers than most, so I would expect most people setting out to look into this to get to the "Design data-collection protocol" stage, acquire a monumental headache, and then go research which kind of diet is easiest to stick with instead.
When you're going off of personal observation, how do you distinguish whether preference for number of partners is a (relatively) hard-coded variable in the brain like sexuality, or if it's something highly malleable like e.g. preference to live in a rural or suburban area? Obviously empirically there are people who prefer to be polyamorous, people who prefer to be monogamous, and people who could go either way, but it doesn't necessarily seem obvious to me that there are a whole bunch of people who inherently long to be polyamorous that are being stifled by our monogamous society. (Not sure if that's what you're claiming.)
I have seen people end up in monogamous relationships, later on realize that loving one person doesn't prevent them from falling in love with other people as well, and then be unable to even really talk about the issue with their partner, since Western culture tends to interpret falling in love with somebody else as an automatic sign of the relationship having fundamentally failed.
I have seen several cases of relationships in which the other person seems to be strongly mono by nature, and the other strongly poly by nature. They generally don't go very well, though they sometimes do: this seems to require the mono partner being of the type who can be okay with their partner dating others. Otherwise one of them is going to end up deeply unhappy, even if the relationship lasts.
And someone people aren't either one. Polyamory isn't the only kind of non-monogamy, and of course there are those who don't do sexual and/or romantic relationships at all.