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Gleb_Tsipursky comments on Intentionally Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Comments (89)
About the article on polyamory: the goal of that article is to contribute to de-stigmatizing polyamory and promoting thinking about relationships rationally in general. We accept that it might turn off some people.
Sorry to hear that you perceive a tone of talking down to the audience. As you can see in our mission statement, we aim to "we empower individuals and organizations to refine and reach their goals by transforming recent research on rational thinking and emotional intelligence into practical and easy-to-use strategies and tools conveyed in a friendly and engaging manner." Can you clarify where you perceive the tone of talking down? We'd certainly like to avoid conveying that tone on our website. On Less Wrong, we are not dealing with our target audience, though - we are dealing with peer aspiring rationalists, who we hope can help collaborate together with us to spread rational thinking.
I concur with shminux -- glancing through the polyamory article left me with two impressions: (1) You think I am an idiot; (2) You think polyamory is great.
Without going into style issues, I think the major problem (for me) is the way the article is structured. I would generally expect an intelligent article to state the problem, discuss various approaches, point out the pros and cons of each, talk about trade-offs involved, etc. In this case -- and I am exaggerating only a little bit -- the article is structured like this:
I am sure you're very familiar with agitprop. Well, don't do that :-/
I see your point. The article is meant to engage a broad audience, so it's targeted at creating cognitive ease through telling stories. It's possible it went a little overboard, and we'll keep that in mind for the future.
On a tangent, I'm pretty familiar with agitprop, I research Soviet agitprop as one of my primary scholarly activities. Believe me, actual agitprop is quite quite different from what we're doing. However, again, your point is well taken for future reference.
It pattern-matches to advertising and heavy-handed propaganda.
I know, that's why I mentioned it.
Well the basic "rational" argument for polyamory is very similar to the standard "rational" argument for communism from a century ago.
Argument for communism:
Argument for polyamory:
Examples?
I'm curious whether you believe there are any significant differences between rational arguments for communism and polyamory?
After all, communist governments, as my research shows, used coercion extensively to get their citizens to comply with the official ideology. I see this as a major difference between polyamory and communism - "rational" arguments for communism called for the use of force against others to take away their property, and "rational" arguments for polyamory simply call for tolerance, as in the blog post I wrote.
But we might be misunderstanding each other here, so I'd be glad to learn more about your viewpoint :-)
I'm not sure how far I can push this but the more I think about the topic, the more analogies I see.
There were no communist governments a century ago. Do I think polyamourists will seize power in some country? Probably not, but then again the chain of events leading to Lenin seizing power in Russia involved a number of unlike events.
No, you're arguing people are irrational for preferring monogamy. True, you're not arguing for using force against the "irrational" but then again moderate socialists argued for a peaceful transition.
The problem is that neither polyamory or collective property works on a large scale (they also work on small scales to approximately the same extent). In both cases they break down in a way that's easy to attribute to "undesirable traits", namely jealousy or greed respectively. Thus, when faced with a system that's breaking down due to "selfish behavior" there is a great temptation to prop it up with violence against the practitioners of said behavior.
Note: being propped up with violence is not in itself necessarily a problem, after all the systems being replaced also require violence to prop them up. Private property requires violence against theives and to a lesser extend monogamy requires violence against adulterers (the recent refusal of the state to supply the latter is part of the reason monogamy is breaking down).
To clarify, I'm not arguing that "people are irrational for preferring monogamy." The article I wrote advocates for "openness and acceptance of poly relationships as one among many mainstream relationship styles." So the crux of the matter is about tolerance of polyamory as one among many mainstream relationship styles, not about transitioning to polyamory as the normative style. In fact, I do not consider myself polyamorous, if you are curious - I am in a monogamous relationship myself, and am not open to other relationships. I do believe strongly in acceptance of polyamory as a mainstream relationship style, due to my desire to decrease social stigma around polyamory
No it doesn't. The bulk of the article focuses on encouraging people to pursue poly relationships, not on encouraging them to "tolerate" others perusing those relationships.
So if you were in Mary's situation what would you do? If the answer doesn't fit one of your two scenarios, why wasn't it listed as an additional scenario?
I think we have a difference in our interpretation of the article I wrote. My point was to promote openness to polyamory as "one among many mainstream relationship styles". Because of the current social stigma against polyamory in mainstream society, the article was defending the validity of polyamory as one among many relationship styles, and discouraging cached thought patterns. The article thus may "feel" like it encourages people to pursue poly relationships, but in actuality, due to the current mainstream anchoring, its effect is to promote tolerance of others pursuing those relationships.
My own sentiments don't apply here, as Mary is in a different situation than I am. In both cases, Mary was open to the relationship with John. Since I am not open to other relationships personally, it's a non-issue for me.
What do you mean by that, should we also promote openness to shared-property communes as "one among many lifestyle" options. How about astrology as "one of many options for predicting the future"? In a sense the answer is yes, i.e., we shouldn't burn people who do these things at the stake. On the other hand we probably shouldn't be encouraging people to do those things either.
Your article certainly looks much more like its written in with the latter rather then the former meaning of "promote openness" in mind. After all, no one is burning polyamourists at the stake.
Re polyamory, it's a good topic to bring up when people are already involved and understand the basics. It if comes up first thing, they label you as swingers or some other "weirdos" and lose interest.
Re tone. Here is your mission statement:
Or, in other words, "we dumb things down so your simple minds can understand". For comparison, CFAR's vision page , while it also could use some improvement, says stuff like
and
The difference may seem subtle, but they include themselves in the group that is learning, not just teaching.
To be clear, I certainly think we are also learning - we convey these strategies and tools to ourselves in a friendly and engaging manner and strive to optimize ourselves just as much as we convey them to external audiences. However, I see where there can be a misunderstanding of the mission statement, and we will take that into consideration at our next revision meeting. Appreciate you pointing out the negative interpretation of "dumbing down" that can one can read into that statement. What would be any suggestions on improving the mission statement, from you or anyone else?
Regarding CFAR and its vision statement: I think it's best to compare vision statement to vision statement. Our vision statement is "We envision a world where individuals, organizations, and governments rely on research-based strategies, constantly improving their ability to evaluate reality clearly and make effective decisions, enabling all of us to live optimally happy, healthy, fulfilling and flourishing lives." Do you think this can be misread in a problematic manner? Or even better, do you or anyone else have any suggestions on improving the vision statement?
Thanks for engaging so thoroughly, really appreciate the advice :-)
The issue is not so much with the wording of the mission statement but with the underlying sentiment that get's expressed.
CFAR does not try to dumb down things so that everybody can understand it. To the extend that you want to do that, you have to understand what that goal entails. CFAR rationality is a lot about self-skepticism. They are not confident that they know the truth and the problem is simply about enlightening the masses with that truth.
To me I read in neither of those statements that de-stigmatizing polyamory is part of your mission.
To be clear, our mission is to have more people think rationally about relationships, and we perceive de-stigmatizing polyamory as one subcomponent of that mission.
But your comments are duly noted, and we will be working on another post soon. Thanks for helping incrementally update my beliefs