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shminux comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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Scott Adams
Living in the same house and coordinating lives isn't a method for ensuring that people stay in love; being able to is proof that they are already in love. An added social construct is a perfectly reasonable option to make it harder to change your mind.
The point of the quote is that it tends to make it harder to stay in love. Which is the opposite of what people want when they get married.
What if he wanted to make them stay in love?
Then he would let them work out a custom solution free of societal expectations, I suspect. Besides, an average romantic relationship rarely survives more than a few years, unless both parties put a lot of effort into "making it work", and there is no reason beyond prevailing social mores (and economic benefits, of course) to make it last longer than it otherwise would.
Just to clarify, you figure the optimal relationship pattern (in the absence of societal expectations, economic benefits, and I guess childrearing) is serial monogamy? (Maybe the monogamy is assuming too much as well?)
Certainly serial monogamy works for many people, since this is the current default outside marriage. I would not call it "optimal", it seems more like a decent compromise, and it certainly does not work for everyone. My suspicion is that those happy in a life-long exclusive relationship are a minority, as are polyamorists and such.
I expect domestic partnerships to slowly diverge from the legal and traditional definition of marriage. It does not have to be about just two people, about sex, or about child raising. If 3 single moms decide to live together until their kids grow up, or 5 college students share a house for the duration of their studies, they should be able to draw up a domestic partnership contract which qualifies them for the same assistance, tax breaks and next-of-kin rights married couples get. Of course, this is a long way away still.
To my mind, the giving of tax breaks etc. to married folks occurs because (rightly or wrongly) politicians have wanted to encourage marriage.
I agree that in principle there is nothing wrong with 3 single moms or 5 college students forming some sort of domestic partnership contract, but why give them the tax breaks? Do college kids living with each other instead of separately create some sort of social benefit that "we" the people might want to encourage? Why not just treat this like any other contract?
Apart from this, I think the social aspect of marriage is being neglected. Marriage for most people is not primarily about joint tax filing, but rather about publicly making a commitment to each other, and to their community, to follow certain norms in their relationship (e.g., monogamy; the specific norms vary by community). This is necessary because the community "thinks" pair bonding and childrearing are important/sacred/weighty things. In other words, "married" is a sort of honorific.
Needless to say, society does not think 5 college students sharing a house is an important/sacred/weighty thing that needs to be honoured.
This thick layer of social expectations is totally absent for the kind of arm's-length domestic partnership contract you propose, which makes me wonder why anybody would either want to call it marriage or frame it as being an alternative to marriage.
I could make exactly the same argument about divorce-able marriage and wonder why would anyone call this get-out-whenever-you-want-to arrangement "marriage" :-D
The point is, the "thick layer of social expectations" is not immutable.
If traditional marriage is a sparrow, then marriage with no-fault divorce is a penguin, and 5 college kids sharing a house is a centipede. Type specimen, non-type specimen, wrong category.
Social expectations are mutable, yes - what of it? Do you think it's desirable or inevitable that marriage just become a fancy historical legal term for income splitting on one's tax return? Do you think sharing a house in college is going to be, or ought to be, hallowed and encouraged?
Agreed, no fault divorce laws were a huge mistake.
From which point of view?
I don't think anyone suggested that?
Some marriages are of convenience, and the honorific sense doesn't apply as well to people who don't fit the romantic ideal of marriage.
It reduces the demand for real estate, which lowers its price. Of course this is a pecuniary externality so the benefit to tenants is exactly counterbalanced by the harm to landlords, but given that landlords are usually much wealthier than tenants...
Yes and the social benefit is already captured by the roommates in the form of paying less rent.
I recommend reading the whole Scott Adams post from which the quote came. The quote makes little sense standing by itself, it makes more sense within its context.
True or false, I'm trying but I really can't see how this is a rationality quote. It is simply a pithy and marginally funny statement about one topic.
I think it's time to add one new rule to the list, right at the top:
Can anyone say that in fewer words?
This is how:
The rest of the logic in the link I gave is even more interesting (and "rational").
Making one's point in a memorable way is a rationality technique.
As for your rule, it appears to me so subjective as to be completely useless. For one where one sees "what to believe" another sees "how to think".
Assume for the sake of argument, the statement is correct.
This quote does not expose a fallacy, that is an error in reasoning. There is nothing in this quote to indicate the rationality shortcoming that causes people to believe the incorrect statement. Rather this exposes an error of fact. The rationality question is why do people come to believe errors of fact and how we can avoid that.
You may be reading the sunk cost fallacy into this quote, or it may be in an unquoted part of the original article, but I don't see it here. If the rest of the article better elucidates rationality techniques that led Adams to come to this conclusion, then likely the wrong extract from the article was selected to quote.
Making one's point in a memorable (including humorous) way may be an instrumental rationality technique. That is, it helps to convince other people of your beliefs. However in my experience it is a very bad epistemic rationality technique. In particular it tends to overweight the opinions of people like Adams who are very talented at being funny, while underweighting the opinions of genuine experts in a field, who are somewhat dry and not nearly as amusing.
The idea that marriage is purely about love is a recent one.
Adams' lifestyle might work for a certain kind of wealthy high IQ rootless cosmopolitan but not for the other 95% of the world.
If this is a criticism, it's wide off the mark.
Note his disclaimer about "the best economic arrangement". And he certainly speaks about the US only.
And it speaks volumes that he views it as an "economic arrangement", like he's channeling Bryan Caplan.
I don't understand.
It looks to me as if Adams's whole point is that marriage isn't supposed to be primarily an economic arrangement, it's supposed to be an institution that provides couples with a stable context for loving one another, raising children, etc., but in fact (so he says) the only way in which it works well is economically, and in any other respect it's a failure.
It's as if I wrote "Smith's new book makes a very good doorstop, but in all other respects I have to say it seems to me an abject failure". Would you say it speaks volumes that I view Smith's book as a doorstop? Surely my criticism only makes sense because I think a book is meant to be other things besides a doorstop.