Great post. Three points -

1) The calculation is even easier for people who have their income directly tied to performance or entrepreneurship... if you can get one good insight out of book, it's a net gain. Most of the highly successful people I know have spent thousands or more on books. I buy them like crazy, I just got 32 audiobooks during a big sale at Audible. Books are an amazing value.

2) You know that old quote "Information wants to be free?" It's actually only half the quote. Here's the whole thing Brand Stewart said -

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

3) Please consider adding affiliate links to your post, either personally or for SIAI or another reputable charity? I know the conflict of interest thing, but you're just increasing Amazon's margins and leaving money for good causes on the table by not adding affiliate links. It's ridiculously simple to do -

Sign up here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Click "get a link" when signed on the relevant page.

Use that link instead of the link without the affiliate. Doesn't change functionality for readers/users at all.

Seriously, I might buy that Foundations book you recommend, I'd much rather $1 or $2 to go your way or the way of a charity you respect. Sure, it's a tiny bit of money, but in scale it adds up.

It's normally bad form to just write a comment saying "wow, this is awesome" - but I thought an upvote wasn't enough.

So:

Wow, this is awesome. Thank you for doing this and sharing the results.

I moved out of the hood for good, you blame me?

Niggas aim mainly at niggas they can't be.

But niggas can't hit niggas they can't see.

I'm out of sight, now I'm out of they dang reach.

-- Dr. Dre, "The Watcher"

This post is magnificent. So much candid introspection on an area most people are very private about, and so much clear analysis instead of just going with emotions/aesthetics/cultural preferences. Wow.

On this -

When one is monogamous, one can only date monogamous people. When one is poly, one can only date poly people. ... 1I'm counting willingness that one's sole partner have other partners (e.g. being an arm of a V) to be a low-key flavor of being poly oneself, not a variety of tolerant monogamy. I think this is the more reasonable way to divide things up given a two-way division, but if you feel that I mischaracterize the highly simplified taxonomy, do tell.

I could weigh in on this. It's worth looking at the word normative -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative

"Normative standards" basically mean whatever is the baseline for comparison. So the taxonomy you set up is "21st century Western-style monogamy" vs. "not 21st century Western-style monogamy" - and by 21st century Western-style monogamy, I mean a single partner, choosing relationships individually through social exploration, choosing long term partners on the basis primarily of emotion rather than purely pragmatic concerns (the pragmatic concerns become more of a baseline filter, as opposed to the whole consideration) - etc, etc.

There's other things that move outside the taxonomy you set up. 18th century American monogamy, for instance, was highly pragmatic and about specialization of labor. George and Martha Washington often advised younger friends, colleagues, young army officers, and the daughters of their friends to marry purely "checklist style" - good character, good family person, solid income or housekeeping skills, good family, etc. Love/lust/affection came last on the checklist, if at all.

I mention that, because it's kind of subtly buried in the post the assumption that 21st century Western-style monogamy is the normative standard. Maybe not. Maybe 18th century American monogamy would be recognizable in the taxonomy as "monogamy" - but there are things outside of it.

Going a little further, "polyamory" - from my limited understanding - conveys "-amory" - love, emotion, etc. - not, say, a purely pragmatic arrangement of having multiple partners to the end of some objective. Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan and his family ruled the island 250 years. He had 19 wives and concubines. The historical record isn't completely accurate, but one gets the impression that he had serious genuine affectionate with 3-4 of his wives in his life, and the rest were political arrangements or for having children and paternity.

You could say Tokugawa 19 wives/concubines (who almost certainly would have been exclusive to him under serious penalty if caught doing otherwise) were "a low-key flavor of being poly oneself, not a variety of tolerant monogamy" - but I think that looks at the 21st century Western-style monogamy as the normative standard, notes that Tokugawa's wives don't fall into the cateogry, and puts them in the poly category. But that doesn't seem quite right...

I agree that there's "monogamy" and "everything else" in Western culture right now, but it hasn't always been the case, might not always be the case, and I don't think polyamory is the only alternative to monogamy. One dichotomy worth looking at is whether partners are picked more coldly and dispassionately, or with warmth and affection and emotion. Both polyamory and 21st C Western-style monogamy both tend to assume the emotional connection there, which I get the impression actually still isn't the case everywhere in the world, like Africa or the Middle East, and times might be changing elsewhere in the world. In fact, I'd strongly suspect that there will be a trend towards more Tokugawa-style dispassionate choosing of non-monogamous partners for political, economic, and hereditary reasons going forwards. It still will be a small minority of the population, but probably a larger small minority than now. And it probably doesn't make sense to add that in with any "-amory" grouping, being that those arrangements are chosen not for the warmth and connection, but for other reasons.

I used to think I was a very firm deontologist, but that was mainly because I didn't want ethical rules to be bent willy-nilly to maximize something simple like "number of lives saved." I didn't, for example, want torture to be legal. I wanted to live in a world with "rights" -- that is, ethical rules that ought not to be broken even when the circumstances change, for all possible circumstances with non-negligible probability. You don't want to live in a world where people are constantly reconsidering "Hm, is it worth it at this moment to not steal Sarah's property?" You want to live in a world where people understand that stealing is wrong and that's that. You want some rigidity.

I think a lot of self-identified deontologists think along these lines. They associate utilitarianism with "the greatest good for the greatest number," and then imagine things like "it is for the good of this great Nation that you be drafted to dig ditches this year" and they shudder.

That shudder isn't necessarily a "confabulation." The reason you shudder at the thought of a moral rule to "maximize utility" is that there is no definition of utility or "human value," simple enough to state in one sentence, that wouldn't result in a hell-world if you systematically maximized it. Human value is complicated, as this site has been at pains to tell us. Pick something (like "number of lives saved") and optimize for that, and you won't like the results.

People come up with deontological constraints, I think, to deal with the fact that "maximizing utility," when you visualize it, looks very, very bad. Modeling utilitarianism to low precision looks bad. Adding more subtlety to the model might not be so bad. Adding in terms like sympathy, respect for life, and so on as positive goods, so that throwing someone off a trolley is not a clear win. Or you could model human value by appealing to rights. Either way you haven't really put your finger on what you mean by "moral." If we could define morality rigorously, life would be easy, and it isn't.

I didn't say it was a good thing! But as Manfred points out, I can imagine it. More than just imagine it: I know that people hold such beliefs, are sincere about it, and act upon them in acceptably predictable ways. I can also imagine it being true (like, it cause strange psychological damage, or if you zoom out and look at the universe like a painting it's prettier when purely heterosexual, or unresolved sexual tension is a really important emotion, whatever) - but that doesn't put me in the same mental state as people who currently believe it; namely, it makes me fall over laughing at how deeply weird the universe is.

It does make me no different from the theist who, upon reading blog posts carefully explaining "No, we don't hate your god, we just think it's a silly idea like the tooth fairy", stammers "Buh... buh... WHY?", looks for arguments, find they don't at all match eir arguments for theism, and walks away scratching eir head. The cure is more blog posts.

I downvoted because of the assumption that there's something obviously wrong with jealousy and that monogamy is suboptimal. It's possible that both jealousy and monogamy are necessary components of reaching areas of utility that can't be accessed in the context of casual relationships. You could be gaining short-term pay off (not feeling jealous, being able to satisfy short-term urges) at the cost of higher utility long-term pay off (a traditional romantic relationship). Nothing is the story suggest that you'd obviously know if you were missing out on the latter either.

It has stimulated some good discussion about alternative reasons that this phenomenon exists.

I had neglected this important consideration and I will retract my downvote until I have thought about this more. I still think this post shows off some bad cognitive habits, and I'm afraid that it getting many upvotes would both incentivize bad cognitive habits and reflect poorly on Less Wrong. Thus currently my policy is "downvote if it gets above 15, upvote if it gets below 0, else do nothing".

It was not an attempt to construct a model of human psychology, which would be more fit for a PhD thesis than a 550 word post.

I didn't mean to imply that. I was trying to say "this is not how one should generally go about constructing a model of any aspect or set of aspects of human psychology" but thought that sounded too clunky.

I agree that a <1000 word post shouldn't go into lots of details, but if you're trying to keep it short then I think it's a bad idea to put forth a hypothesis unless it's sufficiently clear that it's a particularly good or interesting one. I think you could have spent the words you did on your hypothesis much more effectively by proposing some plausible hypotheses and then explicitly asking Less Wrong what they thought. I would consider upvoting the post if you did this, sexy title be damned, but I realize that would be a fair bit of work for you even if you agreed it would be better.

(Parts of this comment were misinterpreted. I have slightly edited this comment to make it clearer; this editing was done after lionhearted replied to it. )

I downvoted this post. The OP describes a phenomenon that everyone knows about, then suggests that "stupidity" (a word mostly left undefined) and "malice" aren't good explanations. (How did "malice" ever seem like a good explanation in the first place?) That's kind of correct, maybe, depending on what class of things the OP is using "stupidity" to refer to. A single word is never a good explanation for an aspect of human psychology. The OP then suggests that the "egalitarian instinct" is an explanation. The OP gives little explanation for this explanation (ETA: I didn't mean explaining what the egalitarian instinct is, which is easily researched by those interested, but explaining more persuasively/effectively how it explains the phenomenon mentioned), no mention of other possible explanations (no acknowledgment of the existence of other possible explanations), and no description of what the world would look like if the OP's explanation were wrong. Thinking up one plausible explanation for an observed phenomenon is fine, I guess, if that's where you want to start, and you don't care too much about the phenomenon in question. Writing a Less Wrong post that looks exactly like that, though, is just wrong. This is not how you go about constructing a model of human psychology.

I would like to complain in more detail about the way "stupidity" and "malice" are brought up and almost immediately dismissed. It causes some part of the the reader's brain to read along and think "Yeah, stupidity doesn't sound like a very good hypothesis, and huh, malice doesn't either... I wonder what a good explanation would be? Oh, the OP suggests the egalitarian instinct, that's comparatively a lot more plausible than stupidity or malice which means it's probably correct." If stupidity and malice had never been brought up, the reader would be a lot more likely to treat the proposed explanation of egalitarianism with a healthier amount of skepticism. Bringing up the red herrings thus misleads.