Related article: Polyhacking

Note: This article was posted earlier for less than a day but accidentally deleted.

Although polyamory isn't one of the "official" topics of LW interest (human cognition, AI, probability, etc...), this is the only community I'm part of where I expect a sufficiently high number of members to have experience with it to give useful feedback. 

If you go looking for advice or articles about polyamory on the internet, you mostly get stuff written by polyamorists that are happy with their decisions. Is this selection bias? Where are the people whose relationships (or social lives, out anything) got damaged or ruined by experimenting with Consensual Non-Monogamy?

I'm posting this hoping for feedback, negative AND positive, on experiences with polyamory. I considered putting this in an Open Thread, but it occurred to me that many other LW readers might be interested in whether polyamory has drawbacks they need to be aware of. If you have experience with CNM (including first-hand witnessing, which has the added bonus of not requiring you to out yourself while still participating in the dialogue), please comment with your overall impression and as much detail as you would like to include (I am also putting my experiences there rather than in this post). If you've seen multiple poly relationships, multiple comments would make tallying slightly easier. I will try to upvote people who feed me data, a la LW surveys. If there are sufficient comments, I will periodically go through them and post a rough ratio of good to bad experiences at the bottom of this article.

PSA: The Username account is available for use by any who wish to remain anonymous. The password is left as an exercise for the reader. Hat tip... Username.

A Cracked.com columnist gives a witty explanation of some of the same problems EY points out with political teams.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-internet-convinced-me-not-to-vote/

I found this to be a very interesting method of dealing with a modified Prisoner's Dilemma. In this situation, if both players cooperate they split a cash prize, but if one defects he gets the entire prize. The difference from the normal prisoner's dilemma is that if both defect, neither gets anything, so a player gains nothing by defecting if he knows his opponent will defect; he merely has the option to hurt him out of spite. Watch and see how one player deals with this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8

DISCLAIMER: This article was posted a few days ago in Main. If you read it there, you probably don't need to read it again, although there is an additional paragraph at the bottom that might interest you. I am posting it again because I didn't quite understand how posts tend to show up on the site and because I want to get as many eyes on this article as possible.

This topic is not really related to the things normally discussed here, but I think it's really important, and it might interest Less Wrongers, especially since many of us are interested in ethics and utility calculations that are essentially cost-benefit analyses. Bone marrow donation in the United States is managed by the National Marrow Donor Program. Because typing donors for matching purposes can be costly, they often require people signing up to donate to pay a registration fee, which probably prevents a lot of people from signing up. These costs are being covered until the end of the month by a corporate sponsor, which means that right now, all you need to do if you live in the US is go tohttp://marrow.org/Join/Join_Now/Join_Now.aspx and fill out a simple questionnaire. You will be sent a kit to collect a cheek swab, and then you will be entered into the donor database. Doing this does not require you to donate if a match comes up.

The reason I think this might interest Less Wrongers is that this is a really cheap way to improve the world. According to their website, about 1 in 540 potential donors are actually asked to donate, so registering doesn't actually make it all that likely that you will be asked to do anything more. If you ARE a match for someone who needs a donation, the cost to you is at most the temporary pain of marrow extraction (many donors are asked only for blood cells), whereas the other person’s chance to live is much improved. This looks like a huge net positive.

Unfortunately I only found out about this a few days ago, and it only occurred to me [Saturday] that this might be a forum of people who would respond to the argument "you can make the world better at little cost to yourself." However, I ask that you go to the website and spend a few minutes signing up. This is like buying a 1 in 540 lottery ticket that SAVES SOMEONE’S LIFE. If the Singularity hits and an FAI can generate perfectly matched marrow for anyone who needs it from totipotency-induced cells, that will be wonderful, but this is a chance to make sure one more person gets there.

There is now only one day left in which all the costs to the donor are covered. I'm interested in the affect this might have on akrasiac behavior. If you think that signing up is a good idea, you need to do it now. If you put it off with "I'll get to it later," you are essentially saying you won't do it, unless you aren't concerned about having to pay money to sign up. Let us know in the comments if this immediate deadline served to motivate you, or, conversely, irritated you and made you choose not to sign up.

This topic is not really related to the things normally discussed here, but I think it's really important, and it might interest Less Wrongers, especially since many of us are interested in ethics and utility calculations that are essentially cost-benefit analyses. Bone marrow donation in the United States is managed by the National Marrow Donor Program. Because typing donors for matching purposes can be costly, they often require people signing up to donate to pay a registration fee, which probably prevents a lot of people from signing up. These costs are being covered until the end of the month by a corporate sponsor, which means that right now, all you need to do if you live in the US is go to http://marrow.org/Join/Join_Now/Join_Now.aspx and fill out a simple questionnaire. You will be sent a kit to collect a cheek swab, and then you will be entered into the donor database. Doing this does not require you to donate if a match comes up.

The reason I think this might interest Less Wrongers is that this is a really cheap way to improve the world. According to their website, about 1 in 500 potential donors are actually asked to donate, so registering doesn't actually make it all that likely that you will be asked to do anything more. If you ARE a match for someone who needs a donation, the cost to you is at most the temporary pain of marrow extraction (many donors are asked only for blood cells), whereas the other person’s chance to live is much improved. This looks like a huge net positive.

Unfortunately I only found out about this a few days ago, and it only occurred to me today that this might be a forum of people who would respond to the argument "you can make the world better at little cost to yourself." However, I ask that you go to the website and spend a few minutes signing up. This is like buying a 1 in 500 lottery ticket that SAVES SOMEONE’S LIFE. If the Singularity hits and an FAI can generate perfectly matched marrow for anyone who needs it from totipotency-induced cells, that will be wonderful, but this is a chance to make sure one more person gets there.