I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses.
I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was *awful* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions.
To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner).
I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery.
With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there.
I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good.
>polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex.
Probably! Just like tinder, no-fault divorce, birth control, female higher education, a labor market that doesn't discriminate against women, and not confiscating the babies of unwed mothers or kicking said women out of society. And you can argue against all of those, too, or you can argue that some of them actually have offsetting benefits, but if you're doing the latter, you're just haggling over the trade-offs we should accept for higher male sexual inequality.
Also, nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality that is making someone else either objectively worse off or worse off in relative terms. And while I'm not against the idea that some people should limit their life to decrease overall misery, when I have seen this expressed, the person putting it forth is rarely volunteering to go first or articulating some kind of general principle on the topic.
Yes, haggling could be worthwhile. Of those, Tinder is something I'd say doesn't have to be viewed as an inevitability - it's not ridiculous to consider at least regulation of dating apps to fight this problem. In the same vein subsidies for couples with children and tax breaks for married couples.
I focussed on men so I see why you went for the other examples. But I'll say one argument is that male sexual equality could benefit women, because they benefit from men competing to better husband/dad material(focus on job and stable friendships) instead of better fling material (focus on gym+politics).
> nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality
Yes, everyone is a bit evil. But re: articulating general principles, Categorical imperative, veil of ignorance, and negative utilitarianism all seem to say that one should "volunteer" in this way. And one can at least choose to ostracise people who exploit inequality for their own gain too much. Again assuming that the inequality situation is true, it might be that for a community to be stable, it should adopt a principle like that one.
I wouldn't actually be a one to do that though; I love my poly friends.
Not all women would be happier with a husband and kids. Some percentage, who are currently not getting it, would be happier; I don't know how many. Another factor is how *much* happier those women would be with that outcome; plausibly this is a lot; but I still don't know how much.
If we did some research and gave ourselves an idea of how much happier people are with families, and how much people are not getting that, at what threshold would it make us want to change something? Eg, at what threshold does it become more important than the happiness levels of other people we're considering? I heard a sad statistic about this, but I later found out the stat was dubious, so I'm not sure what to think.
However, I see no reason why we can't let people choose their own way, whether that's marriage or not, kids or not, or hell, running off to sail around the world alone, or devoting their lives to poor people. We should all be able to choose the way we want to live our lives. We may be wrong, but that's on us.
The stats I've seen are that older women who didn't want kids and didn't have them are largely happy with their lives. Same with older women who did want kids and had kids, although the numbers are, interestingly, slightly lower for this group.
WRT marriage, there are so many studies out there, but I read a review article a while ago that assessed the methodology, data collection, stats, bias, etc. of a large number of papers on the subject of marriage, wellbeing, happiness, etc. Wish I'd saved it! Their conclusion was that men overall were happier and healthief in marriages, while a large majority of women were happier and healthier outside of marriages (including singles, people in long-term relationships who weren't married, and divorced women).
There is at least a wealth of literature on the question of why more-educated women are less likely to have kids. This study found that even though less-educated women *have* more kids, they are no less likely than more-educated women to *want* them https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-reports/its-not-lack-wanting-kids-report-fertility-decision-making-project another reason this matters demographically is that women are now a bit more likely to go to college
The discussion this sometimes leads to is lots of men saying "career-driven posh birds [which there weren't many of in the 50s] don't want to settle". That's part of it, and that's why it's important to think about the production line of marriageable men. Relatedly, being unmarried is now relatively more fun than it was before. Polyamory is part of making that so.
Aside from the children thing, regarding marriage alone, it would be nice if we had that study you mentioned. You don't want to just say this thing without being able to answer the *many* questions it raises about how this can be known when it's somewhat counterfactual ("you didn't have kids, but how would you have felt if you did?").
Exactly! Steve Sailer has the Law of Female Journalism: they tend to argue for situations which make the writer more attractive. At one point, a commenter argued that the equivalent Law of Male Journalism would be the writer arguing for situations which make them higher status...which we *do* see an awful lot of, probably about as much if not more!
As you allude to, we're all out for ourselves, some of us just lie about it better, including *to* ourselves, since the loss in understanding of the universe can sometimes be balanced by making the lie more believable. When you understand reason was made to convince people of things rather than understand the universe (that's a later hack that started in ancient Greece), it makes a lot of things make more sense.
I think there's a lot to be said for socially conservative cultures which ask more of people and have tools for enforcing status compression! But there's also a reason why people get out of them, and if you're endorsing a small part of that without thinking about what you personally -- a globally high-income and probably high-status person -- would give up, then that is a useful exercise to engage in.
To pose this argument in a different way: some people speculate that within two centuries or so, cultures worldwide will necessarily have become more conservative and insular, because the only ones (cultures) that are able to reproduce themselves will be the ones that avoid letting their young people collectively fall into a lifestyle that makes them less likely to reproduce. The claim is that poly is part of that lifestyle (maybe an extreme of it).
I am on the fence about whether this is correct. You can't get an ought from an is, so even if this is correct, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to throw out the principle that we should let people choose the lifestyle they want. But I am interested to know whether that principle has a determinable expiry date.
I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses.
I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was *awful* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions.
To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner).
I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery.
With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there.
I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good.
>polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex.
Probably! Just like tinder, no-fault divorce, birth control, female higher education, a labor market that doesn't discriminate against women, and not confiscating the babies of unwed mothers or kicking said women out of society. And you can argue against all of those, too, or you can argue that some of them actually have offsetting benefits, but if you're doing the latter, you're just haggling over the trade-offs we should accept for higher male sexual inequality.
Also, nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality that is making someone else either objectively worse off or worse off in relative terms. And while I'm not against the idea that some people should limit their life to decrease overall misery, when I have seen this expressed, the person putting it forth is rarely volunteering to go first or articulating some kind of general principle on the topic.
Yes, haggling could be worthwhile. Of those, Tinder is something I'd say doesn't have to be viewed as an inevitability - it's not ridiculous to consider at least regulation of dating apps to fight this problem. In the same vein subsidies for couples with children and tax breaks for married couples.
I focussed on men so I see why you went for the other examples. But I'll say one argument is that male sexual equality could benefit women, because they benefit from men competing to better husband/dad material(focus on job and stable friendships) instead of better fling material (focus on gym+politics).
> nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality
Yes, everyone is a bit evil. But re: articulating general principles, Categorical imperative, veil of ignorance, and negative utilitarianism all seem to say that one should "volunteer" in this way. And one can at least choose to ostracise people who exploit inequality for their own gain too much. Again assuming that the inequality situation is true, it might be that for a community to be stable, it should adopt a principle like that one.
I wouldn't actually be a one to do that though; I love my poly friends.
You assume that all women want marriage and kids.
Not all women would be happier with a husband and kids. Some percentage, who are currently not getting it, would be happier; I don't know how many. Another factor is how *much* happier those women would be with that outcome; plausibly this is a lot; but I still don't know how much.
If we did some research and gave ourselves an idea of how much happier people are with families, and how much people are not getting that, at what threshold would it make us want to change something? Eg, at what threshold does it become more important than the happiness levels of other people we're considering? I heard a sad statistic about this, but I later found out the stat was dubious, so I'm not sure what to think.
Huh. Interesting thought! Thank you.
However, I see no reason why we can't let people choose their own way, whether that's marriage or not, kids or not, or hell, running off to sail around the world alone, or devoting their lives to poor people. We should all be able to choose the way we want to live our lives. We may be wrong, but that's on us.
The stats I've seen are that older women who didn't want kids and didn't have them are largely happy with their lives. Same with older women who did want kids and had kids, although the numbers are, interestingly, slightly lower for this group.
WRT marriage, there are so many studies out there, but I read a review article a while ago that assessed the methodology, data collection, stats, bias, etc. of a large number of papers on the subject of marriage, wellbeing, happiness, etc. Wish I'd saved it! Their conclusion was that men overall were happier and healthief in marriages, while a large majority of women were happier and healthier outside of marriages (including singles, people in long-term relationships who weren't married, and divorced women).
There is at least a wealth of literature on the question of why more-educated women are less likely to have kids. This study found that even though less-educated women *have* more kids, they are no less likely than more-educated women to *want* them https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-reports/its-not-lack-wanting-kids-report-fertility-decision-making-project another reason this matters demographically is that women are now a bit more likely to go to college
The discussion this sometimes leads to is lots of men saying "career-driven posh birds [which there weren't many of in the 50s] don't want to settle". That's part of it, and that's why it's important to think about the production line of marriageable men. Relatedly, being unmarried is now relatively more fun than it was before. Polyamory is part of making that so.
Aside from the children thing, regarding marriage alone, it would be nice if we had that study you mentioned. You don't want to just say this thing without being able to answer the *many* questions it raises about how this can be known when it's somewhat counterfactual ("you didn't have kids, but how would you have felt if you did?").
Exactly! Steve Sailer has the Law of Female Journalism: they tend to argue for situations which make the writer more attractive. At one point, a commenter argued that the equivalent Law of Male Journalism would be the writer arguing for situations which make them higher status...which we *do* see an awful lot of, probably about as much if not more!
As you allude to, we're all out for ourselves, some of us just lie about it better, including *to* ourselves, since the loss in understanding of the universe can sometimes be balanced by making the lie more believable. When you understand reason was made to convince people of things rather than understand the universe (that's a later hack that started in ancient Greece), it makes a lot of things make more sense.
I think there's a lot to be said for socially conservative cultures which ask more of people and have tools for enforcing status compression! But there's also a reason why people get out of them, and if you're endorsing a small part of that without thinking about what you personally -- a globally high-income and probably high-status person -- would give up, then that is a useful exercise to engage in.
To pose this argument in a different way: some people speculate that within two centuries or so, cultures worldwide will necessarily have become more conservative and insular, because the only ones (cultures) that are able to reproduce themselves will be the ones that avoid letting their young people collectively fall into a lifestyle that makes them less likely to reproduce. The claim is that poly is part of that lifestyle (maybe an extreme of it).
I am on the fence about whether this is correct. You can't get an ought from an is, so even if this is correct, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to throw out the principle that we should let people choose the lifestyle they want. But I am interested to know whether that principle has a determinable expiry date.