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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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-- Christopher Ryan
But to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism.
One man's modus ponens...
How so?
It implies that vegeterian diets are harmful and/or suboptimal in all kinds of unforeseen ways, because we haven't evolved to tolerate them, let along optimize for them.
I take your point, though I don't think I'd go so far as to say that the fact that our ancestors were dietary omnivores implies that vegetarianism is sub-optimal. Our evolutionary history is not by any means sure to provide us with optimal dietary behaviors or digestive processes.
Only if you make a few extra assumptions which may or may not be correct, and may or may not also apply to monogamy. (Or commit the naturalistic fallacy.)
The paleo diet movement urges that people should eat as our distant ancestors ate, so where does that leave his analogy?
To the conclusion that we should totally have more sex with everyone.
Somehow I don't have an objection to that.
Well, to be pedantic Christopher Ryan just said “no more”, not “no more and no less”, though the latter was clearly implicated.
Except that the actual diets they propose don't particularly resemble what our distant ancestors likely ate.
I don't know -- the core of paleo diets is "Don't eat grains, don't eat seed oils, avoid processed foods. Eat mostly meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables (with some specifics about particular starchy and non-starchy veggies)".
Of course some paleo people go off the deep end and rail about the dangers of nightshades and how every plant from the New World is a horror to human biochemistry. But I always thought about them as the lunatic fringe.
Why do you think that doesn't resemble what our distant ancestors likely ate?
Our distant ancestors couldn't go to the supermarket and buy meat, fish, eggs, fruits and vegetables.
It's actually unclear what their diet looked like, in particular what proportion of calories they derived from meat. I suppose that their diets varied greatly depending on geographical location, season, etc.
In any case, the meat of wild game animals is nutritionally different than the meat of domesticated sedentary animals, typically feed on soy and corn, and wild berries and tubers are nutritionally different than cultivated fruits and vegetables.
Then we actually don't know whether paleo diets resemble what our distant ancestors likely ate, do we?
That's a pretty certain conclusion.
And yes, I agree that game meat and wild tubers are quite different from pork chops and supermarket sweet potatoes. I am not sure why this is relevant, though. Ignoring agriculture is pretty much impossible for most people and, in any case, we are mostly talking about the right direction to shift your diet in, not about exact matches.
I suppose they may be similar by coincidence.
The point is that the shifts suggested by the paleo dieters aren't necessarily in the direction of truly ancestral diets.
For instance, paleo dieters often suggest to reduce the intake of calories from starches and increase calories from meat, because paleolithic people supposedly ate that way. Setting aside the obvious naturalistic fallacy, it's not actually clear (and it can be quite well false) that paleolithic people normally consumed less starches and more meat than the typical Western pattern diet (or the Mediterranean diet, or other "healthy" variations of the Western pattern diet).
EDIT:
To expand they previous point, it seems that mainstream nutritionists and paleo dieters both agree that the Western pattern diet is not very healthy. Both suggest to reduce sugars, salt, alcohol, caffeine and processed foods.
The difference is that mainstream nutritionists suggest to reduce meat and dairy, while paleo dieters suggest to reduce starchy foods. Paleo dieters can't really support their non-mainstream suggestions with evidence of ancestral dietary patterns.
First, as we agreed, there were many different "truly ancestral" diets. Second, it depends on the starting point. I will assert that if you start with a typical American diet, eating most any kind of paleo will shift you in the right direction. We can argue about starches and such, but it's pretty clear that no one ate large quantities of grains or seed oils 100kya, not to mention all the processed food-like substances :-/
Agreed.
Apart from the fact that, as has been pointed out, there is something wrong with this quote's obvious premise that the omnivorosity of our ancestors is not an argument against vegetarianism, I find the connotations of the phrase "sexual omnivores" somewhat questionable. It suggests that sexuality is somehow of predatory nature.
Our ancestors were dietary omnivores. As a result, we are optimized for that diet, and while that doesn't mean that it's the best possible diet, it is a good reason to believe that you're better off eating some meat. If you're just concerned about you, that's a pretty good criticism of vegetarianism. If you're concerned about animals, or you believe that a god you trust told you not to eat meat, or something like that, it's still a valid criticism, but it's a lot less important and it doesn't address the main reason you chose to be a vegetarian.
I am not a vegetarian, but the usual rebuttal to this is that the standard Western diet bears little more resemblance to the ancestral version than the vegetarian alternative: the nutritional profile of largely sedentary farm animals, lots of grains, and cultivated fruits and vegetables doesn't look much like that of (say) wild tubers, berries, fish, and occasionally an antelope that you pursued into exhaustion and clubbed with a rock. This as far as I can tell is true (albeit complicated by the fact that we have little good data on what our ancestral diets actually looked like, evocative pictures aside, and also by the fact that the best modern analogues we have are fantastically varied), but it isn't a positive argument in favor of vegetarianism.
The analogy to sexual behavior is left as an exercise.
I am a vegetarian, but I still feel like vegetables and meat are really different. If our ancestors ate meat, and we don't, that's a significant difference, even if the precise meat and vegetables aren't the same.
Vegan diets generally lack necessary micro-nutrients unless integrated with supplements or fortified foods.
Vegetarian diets that include diary and/or eggs are usually considered healthy.
Because our ancestors were only omnivores on those relatively rare occasions they could pull it off, and had to be able to function without it, because it was often impossible or very hard?
Oh. Huh.
Yeah, I can see how that might be roughly analogous. It didn't sound like it, just based on the quote ...
It could be, if you subscribe to a weaker version of Kant's "ought implies can" that says (roughly) "ought implies psychologically feasible".
The basic thought here is that moral principles are suspect if they are SO difficult to follow that practically everybody is just always drowning in akrasia & hypocrisy. Think of a moral code that forbids talking, sex, and non-bland food for everyone - it's not physically impossible for humans to follow such a code, so it doesn't violate Kant's original dictum, but it's just not reasonable to expect it to happen in practice.
So I could see an argument that says that asking all humans to be monogamous is like asking them to take a lifelong vow of silence. I don't buy that argument & I actually think monogamy is important, but the logical structure makes sense to me.
Since most people have probably stolen some nonessential thing at least once in their lifetime, the same reasoning means that a moral principle of never stealing nonessential things is also suspect. You'd have to have a principle "don't steal too often" or something like that, not "don't steal"/
If most people have stolen something (have they?) it seems more likely to be out of carelessness than out of irresistible temptation. If you asked me to go 5 years without stealing anything, no problem. I promise I'll never try a raisin from the bulk bin, or use vidtomp3, again.
No sex, talking, or spicy food for 5 years? Even if I could form the intention to do that, I'll fail miserably. It's not a reasonable thing to expect oneself to do.
I don't think so, especially if you also count the ‘theft’ of non-rivalrous goods such as soft copies of copyrighted material. (I dunno about how we could set about to find out who is right about “most people”, though.)
Except Christopher Ryan is talking of people who choose to be monogamous or vegetarians.
Still, somebody on Less Wrong once told me that they thought I wouldn't be “free” to be monogamous in the US because if I stopped being so in the future the police wouldn't punish me. Of course the exact same thing applies to vegetarianism, but that person said I am free to be on a diet (and tapped out).
I think I understand the idea Eugene is getting at in the sibling thread. Let me see if I can explain it a little differently.
As Sister Y explained in this excellent article, people no longer have a way of committing themselves to marriage. This is a problem for two reasons, neither of which applies to vegetarianism.
In a sense, marriage IS commitment, and talking about a "marriage" without commitment is like talking about a "prisoner" who can leave his cell any time he wants, or a "warranty" which can be ignored at the company's discretion. Now, you could argue that this is a matter of semantics, and to some extent you would be right, but there is a deeper issue here; that marriage with commitment and "marriage" without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things, and that we might be justified in not wanting to call these clusters of relationships by the same name at all (some people like to call the modern relationship cluster Marriage 2.0 for just this reason).
If you can't credibly commit to doing something, you are going to have trouble finding people who are willing to expose themselves to risk should you fail to do so. Thus, by removing your freedom to pre-commit yourself to fulfilling a marriage contract, your freedom to enter into these contracts has been reduced (indeed, the collapse of the marriage rate appears to be an empirical confirmation of this model). Thomas Schelling covered this in his The Strategy of Conflict.
Now, the term under discussion is "monogamy", not "marriage", but back to problem 1; the modern serial "monogamy" is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage. Dalrock, for example, argues that serial "monogamy" is a promiscuous and immoral relationship model, which are things he doesn't believe about the traditional religious monogamy model. Whether you agree with him or not, the point is, again, that modern serial "monogamy" is pretty different from old monogamy which meant things like not marrying two wives at once, and maybe some people want to avoid overloading an existing term to incorporate such a different new concept.
For my own part, I would say that two people who are continuing to live together despite both of them preferring to stop doing so, solely because they committed to doing so at some time in the past, is at least as far away from what the word "marriage" properly refers to as two people who are living together today because they feel like it but would happily walk away from each other tomorrow if they found themselves feeling differently.
But I accept that this position is not universally accepted, and in particular that other people might use "marriage" to refer to the first kind of relationship, even among people who can't stand the sight of each other, aren't speaking to each other, don't share goals or values, etc., as long as they are barred from (for example) marrying anyone else and as long as the legal, financial and organizational obligations that go along with marriage can be imposed on them successfully.
And I can see how, for someone whose concept of marriage works this way, the analysis you perform here makes sense: I can't meaningfully precommit to not hating the very sight of you in twenty years, but if marriage is unrelated to whether I hate the sight of you, then I can meaningfully precommit to remaining married to you... and the way I do that is by subjecting myself to a legal system that continues imposing those obligations on me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.
And, sure, I can see how such a person would similarly want words like "monogamy" to refer to such a lifetime commitment, and words like "divorce" to refer to an empty set, etc.
Just to confirm, this is in fact a decent summary of my position.
Well, in the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I'd link to if this thing was faster) I said “relationship with my girlfriend” rather than “marriage with my wife”, which I'd think makes clear the former is what I was talking about. Maybe “monogamy” it's a bad label for it, but ‘$word is a bad label for $thing’ hardly implies ‘I'm not free to do $thing’. (And while it's unlike traditional lifelong monogamy, it's also unlike Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that around here more people practice the latter than the former it seems more useful to me to have a word to distinguish it from the latter than from the former.)
(I'm not sure what exactly Christopher Ryan meant by “monogamy”, but he was opposing it to EEA-style sexual omnivory, which from his description sounds more like Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory than First-World-small-town-mainstream-style serial monogamy to me.)
Frankly, I don't understand this mindset at all.
You commit to the marriage when you say "I do". The idea that you cannot commit unless you have the right to sue your ex-spouse in a court of law for money seem preposterous to me on its face.
Not the right to sue; the right to be sued, which makes you less likely to become an ex-spouse, and more likely to become spouse to begin with.
The difference between monogamy and vegetarianism here is that monogamy requires a binding commitment from another person. Thus, the inability to make a binding contract is a problem for monogamy but not vegetarianism.
How does that distinguish being free to be monogamous and being free to be vegetarian? The number of vegetarians who make binding contracts to be vegetarian is essentially nonexistent.
Why?
Because monogamy relies on your spouse also being monogamous.
And playing chess relies on your opponent also following the rules of chess, so aren't we free to play chess either? (Or will the police arrest me if I castle while my king is in check?)
Chess can rely on reputation since games are short and someone who refuses to play by the rules will find no one to play against (also the stakes are small). (And in high states games, e.g., tournaments you will at least be escorted out for refusing to play by the rules.) Note, that since monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever, reputation is less useful.
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery? (Especially if they do enforce anti-violence and anti-theft laws against people attempting to take matters into their own hands in cases of non-payment or non-delivery). Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
There are many cases where the law doesn't require specific performance. If you hire someone to work for you, they can refuse to come to work. You can fire them, but you can't force them to work for you. If you offer to fix someone's sink in exchange for them fixing your car, one of you could fail to do the work. The other could sue and get paid some money, but the law won't enforce specific performance and you can't actually force another person to fix a sink or a car.
By your reasoning we are not "free to hire someone to do work" or "free to exchange sink fixing for car fixing".
And even in the chess example, you can't force someone to play chess, and if you exclude them from playing because of their reputation, they still are not playing chess with you. Soi by your reasoning, we are not free to "play chess with person X", even if you argue that we are free to play chess provided we aren't picky about partners.
It's true that someone cannot gain a reputation for being honest in monogamy, but they can get a reputation for cheating. It only requires the "can have a reputation for cheating" half in order for reputation to be useful. It still lets them cheat the first time, but they can always cheat the first time in a chess game as well.
We are indeed. One will just have to handle counterparty risk by other means, such as only dealing with people you know well, private enforcement, meeting for simultaneous performance, etc. This is readily observable in the real world everywhere that the legal system is weak, corrupt, or absent.
BTW, and this is just a nitpick, in Western countries where the legal system is reliable, the police do indeed refuse to enforce contracts, because it isn't part of their job. Instead, it is up to a wronged party to bring a civil action to the courts. The police have no role in the matter. Contract rights are not property rights.
As another has already pointed out, the enforcement carried out by the courts almost invariably consists of awarding monetary compensation, not specific performance, which happens only in certain exceptional cases. In the UK, these exceptional cases do not include personal services.
You are trying to put your conclusion into the premise of an absurd hypothetical of Cloud Cuckoo Land. A pension contract that was terminable at will by the pension provider is a pension contract no-one would sign up to. A law saying that all pension arrangements are terminable at will is not going to be passed; if passed, people would find ways to structure their retirement plans that avoid whatever legal definition of "pension contract" was present in such an absurd law. Hey, suppose there was a law that when you buy something online, the supplier has no obligation to supply what you ordered? Well, go ahead and suppose it.
You are presumably trying to draw an analogy with the current state of marriage law. It would be more productive to talk about marriage law directly. Adultery is usually grounds for divorce. That looks like contract enforcement to me -- the sort of enforcement that contracts are subject to in the real world, rather than the fantasy S&M version in which the police drag the disobedient partner back in handcuffs. Time was when the guilty party would be sent away from the severed marriage without a penny (at least, if the guilty party was the woman), but that generally does not happen today. If you think the courts should regard adultery more sternly when deciding the division of the common property, go ahead and argue that, rather than claiming that no-one can be monogamous these days because the police won't "enforce" the marriage contract.
That's not what I meant by monogamy -- I wouldn't call my relationship non-monogamous just because my girlfriend had sex with someone else years before I even met her, any more than I would call someone who used to eat meat but no longer does a non-vegetarian.
I agree that monogamy in your sense of the word would depend on something guaranteeing that enough people stay virgin until old enough to find a lifetime partner.
(I'm assuming you're not talking about contraband, since police will not only refuse to enforce non-payment or non-delivery but also bust your balls if they catch you in a complete transaction.) Reputation can work for commerce too -- ever looked at the feedback on eBay sellers or at TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants?
I don't know whether I'd call it a pension, but I'd say you're certainly free to give me a given amount of money every month as long as you feel like it and then stop. (Of course it'd be foolish for me to rely on that money alone for their maintenance, but that's another issue.)
So what?
Monogamy just means that you do not seek more than one sexual or romantic partner.
You can be monogamous while your party isn't. Whether this would suit you is a matter of personal preferences.
Or, two partners can be monogamous even if they have no legal mean to bind themselves to.
I also mean that by “monogamy”, but other people in this conversation have made clearer they mean something narrower by that word, so this discussion sounds like “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” when Alice has already made clear she means an auditory sensation and Bob has already made clear he means an acoustic wave.
Tapping out.