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ChristianKl comments on Intentionally Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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I don't see a good reason to believe that it's representative of all polyamorous people. There's a certain scene that very much values openness but there are other people who live polyamorously and who aren't very open. Just because the feminist who runs the study is herself very open in her communication and interacts with others who are also very open doesn't mean that everybody is.
You also did present it as fact in your article and especially if you are writing for a naive audience telling them about the uncertainty is useful if you want to train critical thinking. Skepticism is a default for critical thinking. If there no evidence either way, than there no evidence.
Feynman held his cargo-cult science speech about reasoning with better quality.
If you also sincerely believe that we should put more weight on science done with an explicit feminist framework that's a position worthy writing an article about because I guess that you are holding a minority position under self-labeled rationalists.
A core question of rationalism is: "Why do we believe what we believe? In this case you don't tell the reader why you think the particular material you reference should make him believe that poly people are happy and open.
I'm curious why you attribute that position to our blog post - that's the opposite of a steel man move. In fact, the Intentional Insights blog post did not make the claim you seem to attribute to it. What we claimed was the following, which I am quoting from the blog post: "research on poly relationships show that people with consensual non-monogamous relationships are happier, especially with their sex lives, than those who are in traditional monogamous relationships, and communicate more openly."
If you have research - any sort of research - demonstrating otherwise, I would be happy to update my beliefs. I think we can agree that the quality of evidence should be the deciding factor :-)
I think the common meaning of the phrase "research shows X" is "research shows X is true". If that's not what you want to argue you can use phrases like "research suggests X".
If the thing you want to teach is evidence based reasoning it would be still useful to explain a naive audience the strength of the evidence.
A post either has mistakes or it doesn't. The point of steelmanning is to change someone's argument to make it better. I'm not denying that it's possible to steelman the claim that polyamory increases happiness or openness but that's not what I care about here. The thing that matter is whether or not this post encourages critical thinking. Using "show" when you mean "suggest" doesn't help for that goal.
I agree that the common meaning of the phrase "research shows X" is "research shows X is true." However, can you clarify to me where you believe the post makes mistakes in its use of "show" vs. "suggest"?
The statement I made in the salient blog post on the Intentional Insights website was as follows "research on poly relationships show that people with consensual non-monogamous relationships are happier." I believe that the evidence I cited there supports the notion that "research shows X is true" when X = "on poly relationships shows that people with consensual non-monogamous relationships are happier." For examples of such evidence, see this article, or this book or this article.
If I did make a mistake, as you suggest, I'd be glad to update my beliefs - I love to be convinced to do so :-) Indeed, I acknowledged in an earlier comment that the post went a little too strongly into using cognitive ease strategies to make its points. So we'll work to tone down the cognitive ease strategies in the future, and thank you for being one of the people to help update my beliefs incrementally.
My core issue isn't about the availability of research but about the research that you cited. If you want to teach evidence based reasoning than you have to give people good sources. You don't want to teach people to treat media articles titled 12 surprising facts about X as real evidence. It would raise the sanity waterline to teach people that such articles don't constitute evidence.
You cited a link citing the first article. From Ioannidis we know that in general observational studies are pretty unreliable. This article isn't even a good observational studies. The gave their questionnaire only to Swingers and then compare those Swingers with external values from the literature. There no reason to believe that's a good idea for a value like self reported happiness.
As far as the second article goes. First as far as I see you didn't cite it. If you think that it's an important article that someone should use for forming an evidence based view on the subject, you should cite it.
Secondly it says: "However, inconsistent with our predictions, anxiety was unrelated to current relationship status". I don't see how that translates into them being more happy.
As far as the book goes, it doesn't seem to be a peer reviewed study. Even when it might reference them.
It's great to see we are both committed to using evidence, and the debate is now focusing on the nature of the evidence.
I believe I had earlier stated the following in my comment above
As that comment illuminates, I used the kind of evidence available currently.
For the second article, it states "a sizeable minority of people engage in CNM and report high levels of satisfaction." CNM is the common acronym for consensual non-monogamous relationships. To me, "high levels of satisfaction" equates to being "happy." However, I accept that we might interpret the term "high levels of satisfaction" differently - to me, it equates to being "happy," but it might not to you. I think that's primarily a semantic issue, though, and would rather not pursue it.
I am confused by your claims that the book is not a peer reviewed study. It is published by Rowman & Littlefield, a well-known and well-respected publisher, which has a solid peer review process. I would appreciate your clarification on what you meant when you suggested it was not.
The link you give for Level III evidence means that it's "controlled trial without randomization". Controlling against a literature value isn't a controlled trial.
Just given your questionaire to swingers that want to take a questionaire about swingers and presumably give the world a good impression about what it means to be a swinger to some average census value or literature value doesn't work.
The feminist paper says that it uses a qualitative approach. In the hierarchy that you linked that's Level VI.
To the extend that currently there isn't strong evidence available, you shouldn't use definitive language like "show" but suggest to illustrate that the evidence isn't strong.
When reading that your first reaction should be "How do they know?" In this case this is part of their discussion of previous work and a result that comes out of the data they gathered and that they discuss in the methods section. The first paper I looked at from that pile contains lines like "A social constructionist discourse analytic approach was taken to the data.", so again qualitative. The second is also again qualitative. If it's multiple qualitative studies that's in your linked scheme level V.
"Sizable minority" is also a term that doesn't tell you whether the average member of the population is better or worth then average.
It's a book and no study.Books are generally not primary sources.
Regarding the book, I want to draw your attention to the content of my comment above:
Can you please point out to me where we disagree regarding the book being a peer-reviewed study? That was the issue you raised, and that was what I responded to. So please let me know what your thoughts are about this matter.
Books often help to understand a subject matter in more depth. On the other hand they are usually no primary sources and therefore not that good for demonstrating the evidence for particular claims.
I notice I'm confused over your claim about books and primary sources.
My brief monograph, for example, is flush with primary sources. The specific book I cited earlier, the one from the Intentional Insights blog post on polyamory, is a 15-year ethnographic study, and is thus quite full of primary sources. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is also a book, and has plenty of primary sources.
So can you please clarify to me your comments about books? Appreciate it :-)