There is secret knowledge that you pay for (ai-box)
Members do some kooky things (cryonics, polyamory)
Members claim “rationality” has helped them lose weight or sleep better—subject things without controls—rather than something more measurable and where a mechanism is more obvious.
At least one thing is not supposed to be discussed in public (banned memetic hazard). LW members seem significantly kookier when talking about this (and in the original deleted thread) than on more public subjects.
Members have a lot of jargon. It can seem like they’re speaking their own language. More, there’s a bunch of literature embedded in the organization’s worldview; publicly this is treated as simple fiction, but internally it’s clearly taken more seriously.
Although there’s no explicit severing advice, LW encourages (in practice if not in theory) members to act in ways that reduce their out-of-group friendships
The hierarchy is opaque; it feels like there is a clique of high-level users, but this is not public.
Wouldn’t you expect that if the cause actually made sense though? (and not only if this is a cult)
There is secret knowledge that you pay for (ai-box)
Less than 0.01% of the users have played an ai-box game (to my knowledge) and even less have played it for money.
Members do some kooky things (cryonics, polyamory)
Again fairly small subset for the first thing, slightly larger for the second but I guess I will give you that one.
Members claim “rationality” has helped them lose weight or sleep better—subject things without controls—rather than something more measurable and where a mechanism is more obvious.
Probably a tiny subset of users claim that—I personally have never seen anyone claim that rationality helped them sleep better and if you mean that evidence-based reasoning helped them find an intervention designed to increase sleep quality you are grasping for straws.
At least one thing is not supposed to be discussed in public (banned memetic hazard). LW members seem significantly kookier when talking about this (and in the original deleted thread) than on more public subjects.
We are not supposed to write out the actual basilisk (there is only one) on lesswrong.com. There is no problems with talking about it in public and again this affects a tiny portion of users.
Members have a lot of jargon. It can seem like they’re speaking their own language. More, there’s a bunch of literature embedded in the organization’s worldview; publicly this is treated as simple fiction, but internally it’s clearly taken more seriously.
Giving you this one as well.
Although there’s no explicit severing advice, LW encourages (in practice if not in theory) members to act in ways that reduce their out-of-group friendships
Bullshit.
The hierarchy is opaque; it feels like there is a clique of high-level users, but this is not public.
There are just respected users and no clear-cut hierarchy—that’s what happens at most places. For a proxy of who is a high-level user look at the ‘Top Contributors’.
This sort of point-by-point refutation is the same sort of thing that would happen in a church that was trying to defend against allegations of cultyness.
I don’t think lmm’s list of reasons was utterly compelling—good, but not utterly compelling—but I don’t think it would matter if it were a perfect list, because there will always be a defense for accusations of cultyness that satisfies the church/forum.
It is more interesting watching it happen here vs. the church IMO because LW is all about rationality, where the church can always push the “faith” button when they are backed into a logical corner.
At the end of the day, it is just an online forum. But it does sound to me (based on what I can gather from perusing) like there are a group of people here who take this stuff seriously enough so as to make cultyness possible.
I’m sure the “LW/cryonics/transhumanism/basilisk stuff is so similar to how religion works” bit got old a long time ago, but Dear Lord is it apparent and fascinating to me.
This sort of point-by-point refutation is the same sort of thing that would happen in a church that was trying to defend against allegations of cultyness.
Ah, the perennial dilemma of how to respond to an accusation of cultiness. If one bothers to rebut it: that’s exactly what a cult would do! If one doesn’t rebut it: oh, the accusation must be unanswerable and hence true!
I completely understand. And I know mine is pretty cheap reasoning. But it just reminds me of what happens in a similar situation in the church. Feel free to ignore it. As I said, I’m confident it has probably been played out by now. I’m satisfied just to watch in awe.
Wouldn’t you expect that if the cause actually made sense though? (and not only if this is a cult)
Given how much LWers seem to care about effective charity, I’d expect more scrutiny, and a stronger insistence on measurable outcomes. I guess you’re right though; the money isn’t inherently a problem.
Less than 0.01% of the users have played an ai-box game (to my knowledge) and even less have played it for money.
It seems like a defining characteristic; it’s one place where the site clearly differs from more “mainstream” AI research (though this may be a distorted perception since it was how I first heard of LW)
if you mean that evidence-based reasoning helped them find an intervention designed to increase sleep quality you are grasping for straws.
Shrug. It looks dodgy to me. It pattern-matches with e.g. the unverifiable stories people tell of their personal experience of Jesus.
We are not supposed to write out the actual basilisk (there is only one) on lesswrong.com. There is no problems with talking about it in public
That’s not at all clear. I’ve never seen any explicit rules. I’ve seen articles that carefully avoid saying the name.
There are just respected users and no clear-cut hierarchy—that’s what happens at most places.
Even on internet forums there’s usually an explicit distinction between mod and not, and often layers to it. (The one exception I know is HN, and even there people know who pg is, who’s part of YC and who’s not, and stories are presented differently if they’re coming from YC members). And it’s unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other. It raises questions over objectivity, oversight, conflict resolution.
It seems like a defining characteristic; it’s one place where the site clearly differs from more “mainstream” AI research (though this may be a distorted perception since it was how I first heard of LW)
It’s not. Your view is definitely distorted.
Shrug. It looks dodgy to me. It pattern-matches with e.g. the unverifiable stories people tell of their personal experience of Jesus.
..
That’s not at all clear. I’ve never seen any explicit rules. I’ve seen articles that carefully avoid saying the name.
Look around then? Eliezer has even made a Reddit thread for things like that where the basilisk is freely discussed.
Even on internet forums there’s usually an explicit distinction between mod and not, and often layers to it. (The one exception I know is HN, and even there people know who pg is, who’s part of YC and who’s not, and stories are presented differently if they’re coming from YC members). And it’s unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other. It raises questions over objectivity, oversight, conflict resolution.
Yeah, and people here know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is and who is part of MIRI which is LW’s parent organization..
Look around then? Eliezer has even made a Reddit thread for things like that where the basilisk is freely discussed.
I’m not active on reddit. Most forums have a link to the rules right next to the comment box; this one does not. There clearly is a chilling effect going on, because I’ve seen posts that make carefully oblique references to memetic hazards rather than just saying “don’t post the basilisk in the comments please”.
Yeah, and people here know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is and who is part of MIRI which is LW’s parent organization
I have no idea who’s part of MIRI and which posts are or aren’t from MIRI, because we don’t do the equivalent of (YC 09) on stories here. (And HN was explicitly the worst other example I know; they could certainly stand to improve their transparency a lot).
And it’s unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other.
By “first-name terms with each other”, do you mean something more than the literal meaning of “familiar with someone, such that one can address that person by his or her first name”? Because in my experience, treating other users on a first name basis is the default for all users on many Internet forums, LW included.
I meant “talk about each other as if they’re close personal friends”. (Myself I generally try to avoid using first names for people who aren’t such, but I appreciate that that’s probably a cultural difference).
And it’s unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other. It raises questions over objectivity, oversight, conflict resolution.
I think this is more due to the number of people who have their real name as their LessWrong username than any sinister cabal.
Don’t forget that much of the inner circle actually draws a paycheck from the organizations members are encouraged to donate to, and supposedly a fairly large one at that, and that the discussion of how much to donate is framed in terms of averting the destruction of the human race.
That and the polyamory commune are the two sketchiest things IMO, since it shows that the inner circle is materially and directly benefiting from the “altruism” / “rationality” of lower ranking members.
This is a good website, mostly good people on it, but there’s also an impression that there are questionable dealings going on behind the scenes.
much of the inner circle actually draws a paycheck from the organizations members are encouraged to donate to
Would LW be improved if paid employees/consultants of those organizations were barred from membership? (I do realize there are other ways to address this concern, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise… for example, we could re-institute the moratorium on discussing those organizations, or a limited moratorium on fundraising activitiies here, or various other things. I’m just curious about your opinion about that specific solution.)
That and the polyamory commune are the two sketchiest things IMO
I get a kick out of this, because my social circle is largely polyamorous but would mostly consider LW a charming bunch of complete nutjobs on other grounds. Polyamory really isn’t all that uncommon in communities anchored around high-tech development/elite tech schools, IME.
Would LW be improved if paid employees/consultants of those organizations were barred from membership?
No, I suspect it would die. Actionable suggestion though: some kind of “badge” / note (along the lines of the “mod” or “author” tag you get in Disqus, for example). When I worked for a company with user forums it was policy that all staff had badges on their avatars and you should not post from a non-staff account while employed by the company.
I get a kick out of this, because my social circle is largely polyamorous but would mostly consider LW a charming bunch of complete nutjobs on other grounds. Polyamory really isn’t all that uncommon in communities anchored around high-tech development/elite tech schools, IME.
That is very surprising, very different from my experiences. My social circle comes mainly from the University of Cambridge and the London tech scene; I am friends with several furries, more transsexuals, and have had dinner with the maintainer of the BDSM FAQ. Polyamory still seems fucking weird (not offensive or evil, but naive and pretentious, and correlated with what I can probably best summarize as the stoner stereotype). I’ve met a couple of openly poly people and they were perfectly friendly and had the best of intentions but I wouldn’t trust them to organize my closet, yet alone the survival of humanity.
I originally took Moss_Piglet to imply that the leadership were recruiting groupies from LW to have sex with. That I would find very disturbing and offputting. Assuming that’s not an issue, I think the weirdness of the polyamory would be amply countered by evidence of general competence / life success.
Polyamory still seems fucking weird (not offensive or evil, but naive and pretentious, and correlated with what I can probably best summarize as the stoner stereotype). I’ve met a couple of openly poly people and they were perfectly friendly and had the best of intentions but I wouldn’t trust them to organize my closet, yet alone the survival of humanity.
Wth? You seem very prejudiced. What makes people who have multiple relationships this much less trustworthy than ‘normal’ people to you (that you wouldn’t even trust them to organize your closet)?
This whole subject is about prejudice; we judge organizations for their cultlike characteristics without investigating them in detail.
What makes people who have multiple relationships this much less trustworthy than ‘normal’ people to you (that you wouldn’t even trust them to organize your closet)?
I think I was unclear: the implication runs in the opposite direction. All the specific poly individuals I’ve met are people I wouldn’t trust to organize my closet, in terms of general life competence (e.g. ability to hold down a job, finish projects they start, keep promises to friends). As a result, when I find out that someone is poly, I consider this evidence (in the Bayesian sense) that they’re incompetent, the same way I would adjust my estimate of someone’s competence if I discovered that they had particular academic qualifications or used a particular drug. (Obviously all these factors are screened off if I have direct evidence about their actual competence level).
Well, I would certainly agree with this. The poly folk I know in their 40s are as a class more successful in their relationships than the poly folk I know in their 20s.
Of course, this is true of the mono folk I know, also.
Which is what I would expect if experience having relationships increased one’s ability to do so successfully.
That is very surprising, very different from my experiences.
It also agrees with the experience from my real-life social circles, which are dominated by university people from the Helsinki region. Poly seems to be treated as roughly the same as homosexuality: unusual but not particularly noteworthy one way or the other. Treatments in the popular press (articles about some particular poly triad who’s agreed to be interviewed, etc.) are also generally positive.
(nods) Fair enough. My experience is limited to the U.S. in this context. I agree that “recruiting groupies to have sex with,” if I understand what you mean by the phrase, would be disturbing and offputting. Moss_Piglet appears to believe that polyamory is in and of itself a bad sign, independent of whether any groupies are being recruited. Beyond that, I decline to speculate.
I’m just curious about your opinion about that specific solution.
The ethics of conflicts of interest in the media are pretty well-trodden ground; you could adapt any journalistic ethics document into a comprehensive do’s and don’ts list. Do state your financial interests clearly and publicly, don’t mix advertising and information content, etc.
It’s not foolproof and bias is universal, but a conflict of interest on the scale of one’s career and sex life is something a rationalist ought to be at least a little concerned about.
I get a kick out of this, because my social circle is largely polyamorous but would mostly consider LW a charming bunch of complete nutjobs on other grounds. Polyamory really isn’t all that uncommon in communities anchored around high-tech development/elite tech schools, IME.
That may well be true, but it makes little difference. The collapse of sexual mores is directly, IMO causally, linked with decreased stability and fertility; letting it take hold in the highest IQ sections of the population is a recipe for disaster. Engaging in that sort of behavior is strong evidence against a person’s character as a leader.
Engaging in that sort of behavior is strong evidence against a person’s character as a leader.
That’s a silly assertion. First because it’s obviously only true from the point of view of a specific morality. And second, because it ignores the empirical fact that, in full compliance with biology, powerful male leaders usually bed many women.
Do state your financial interests clearly and publicly, don’t mix advertising and information content, etc.
Actually, that sounds like a great idea. I would absolutely endorse a policy along those lines.
The collapse of sexual mores is directly, IMO causally, linked with decreased stability and fertility; letting it take hold in the highest IQ sections of the population is a recipe for disaster. Engaging in that sort of behavior is strong evidence against a person’s character as a leader.
Ah, I see.
Sure, if I believed that failing to conform to previously established sexual mores led to decreased stability, I would no doubt agree that the poly aspects of LW and its various parent organizations were troubling.
Similar things are true of my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc.
Come to that, I suppose similar things are true of my state government, which accepts my marriage to my husband as a family despite this being a clear violation of pre-existing sexual mores, and of large chunks of my country, which accepts marriages between people of different skin colors as families despite this being a clear violation of the sexual mores of a few decades ago.
I’d prefer not to completely derail this into a political/moral argument, since the issue at hand is a bit more relevant. Since you are, as you admit, fairly invested in your position there is little purpose to debate on this point except to distract from the main issue.
Sure; I have no interest in debating with you whether polyamory, homosexuality, miscegenation and other violations of sexual mores really are harmful. As you say, it would be a distraction.
My point was that if they were, it would make sense to object to an organization on the grounds that its leadership approves of/engages in harmful sexual-more-violating activities. What would not make sense is to differentially object to that organization on those grounds.
That is, accepting/endorsing/engaging sexual-more-violating activities might make LW’s parent organizations dangerous, but it doesn’t make them any more dangerous than many far-more-mainstream organizations that do the same things (like my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc).
If this one of the two sketchiest things about the organization, as you suggest, it sounds to me like the organization is pretty darned close to the mainstream, which seems rather opposed to the point lmm was trying to make, and which I originally inferred you were aligning with.
Cool… this sort of thing is far more actionable than “seeming like a cult.”
So, next question. Taking you as representative of the group (which is of course not necessarily true, but we start from where we are)… what is your sense of where each of these falls on the spectrum between “this is legitimately worrying; in order to be less at risk for actual bad consequences LW should actually change so as not to do this” on the one hand, and “this is merely superficially worrying; there are probably no real risks here and LW should merely take steps to reassure worriers not to worry about it”?
I’m legitimately worried about the money and the incentives it creates. What would a self-interested agent (LW seems to use “agent” in exactly the opposite sense to what I’d expect it to mean, but I hope I’m clear) in the position of the LW leadership do? My cynical view is: write some papers about how the problems they need to solve are really hard; write enough papers each year to appear to be making progress, and live lives of luxury. So what’s stopping them? People in charities that provide far more fuzzies than LW have become disenchanted. People far dumber than Yudkowsky have found rationalizations to live well for themselves on the dime of the charity they run. Corrupt priests of every generation have professed as much faith that performing their actual mission would result in very high future utility, while in fact neglecting those duties for earthly pleasures.
Even if none of the leadership are blowing funds on crack and hookers, if they’re all just living ascetically and writing papers, that’s actually the same failure mode if they’re not being effective at preventing UFAI. When founding the first police force, one of Peel’s key principles was that the only way they could be evaluated was the prevalence of crime—not how much work the police were seen to be doing, not how good the public felt about their efforts. It’s very hard to find a similar standard with which to hold LW to account.
It occurs to me as I write that I have no idea what the LW funding structure is—whether the site is funded by the CFAR, MIRI, SIAI or something else. Even having all these distinct bodies with mostly the same members smells fishy, seems more likely to be politics than practicalities.
The kookiness… if LW were really more rational than others, I’d expect them to do some weird-but-not-harmful-to-others things. So I suspect this is more a perception than reality thing (Though if there are good answers to “what’s the empirical distinction between real and fake cryonics” and “why do you expect polyamory to turn out better for you lot than it did for the ’60s hippie communes” it’d be nice to see them). IMO the prime counter would be visible effectiveness. A rich person with some weird habits is an eccentric genius; a poor person with weird habits is just a crank.
It would be really nice to have more verifiable results that say LW-style rationality is good for people (or to know that it isn’t and respond accordingly). The failure mode here is that we do a bunch of things that feel good and pat each other on the back and actually it’s all placebos. We actually see a fair few articles here claiming that reading LW is bad for you, or that rationality doesn’t make people happier. On thinking it through this would be the kind of cult that’s basically harmless, so I’m not too concerned. On the perception side, IMO discussing health is not worth the damage it does to the way the community is seen (the first weight-loss thread I saw caused a palpable drop in my confidence in the site). I’ve no idea how to practically move away from doing so though.
Secrets and bans rub me very strongly the wrong way, and seem likely to damage our efforts in nonobvious ways (to put it another way, secretive organizations tend to become ineffective at their original aims, and I’m worried about this failure mode). I certainly don’t think the ban on the basilisk is effective at its purported aim, given that it’s still talked about on the internet. And just having this kind of deception around immediately sets off a whole chain of other doubts—what if it’s banned for other reasons? What else is banned?
If there really is a need for these bans, there should be a clear set of rules and some kind of review. That would certainly address the perception, and hopefully the actuality too.
I think the use of fictional evidence is actually dangerous. Given the apparently high value of LW-memetic fiction in recruiting, I don’t know where the balance is. I think overuse of jargon is just a perceptual problem (though probably worth addressing).
I have… unusual views on diversity, so I don’t think setting people against their less-rational friends is an actual problem (in the sense of being damaging to the organization’s aims); I file this as a perceptual problem. The most obvious counter I can think of is more politeness about common popular misbeliefs, and less condescension when correcting each other. But I suspect these are problems inherent to internet fora (which doesn’t mean they’re not real; I would suggest that e.g. reddit has a (minor) cultish aspect to it, one that’s offputting to participation. But there may not be any counter).
The hierarchy: in the short term it’s merely annoying, but long-term I worry about committee politics. If some of the higher-ups fell out in private (and given that several of them appear to be dating each other that seems likely) and began sniping at each other in the course of their duties, and catching innocent users in the crossfire… I’ve seen that happen in similar organizations and be very damaging. Actual concern.
So in summary: actual concern: where the money goes, any secrets the organization keeps, clarity of the leadership hierarchy, overuse of fiction. superficial issues: overuse of jargon. The rest of my list is on reflection probably not worth worrying about.
MIRI and SIAI are the same organization: SIAI is MIRI’s old name, now no longer used because people kept confusing the Singularity Institute and Singularity University.
(AFAIK, LW has traditionally been funded by MIRI, but I’m not sure how the MIRI/CFAR split has affected this.)
“why do you expect polyamory to turn out better for you lot than it did for the ’60s hippie communes”
One might as well ask “why do you expect monogamy to turn out better than it did for all the people who have gone through a series of dysfunctional relationships”. Being in any kind of relationship is difficult, and some relationships will always be unsuccessful. Furthermore, just as there are many kinds of monogamous relationships—from the straight lovers who have been together since high school, to the remarried gay couple with a 20-year age difference, to the arranged marriage who’ve gradually grown to love each other and who practice BDSM—there are many kinds of polyamorous relationships, and the failure modes of one may or may not be relevant for another.
If you specify “the kinds of relationships practiced in the hippie communes of the sixties”, you’re not just specifying a polyamorous relationship style, you’re also specifying a large list of other cultural norms—just as saying “conventional marriages in the 1950′s United States” singles out a much narrower set of relationship behaviors than just “monogamy”, and “conventional marriages among middle class white people in the 1950′s United States” even more so.
And we haven’t even said anything about the personalities of the people in question—the kinds of people who end up moving to hippie communes are likely to represent a very particular set of personality types, each of which may make them more susceptible to some kinds of problems and more resistant to others. Other poly people may or may not represent the same personality types, so their relationships may or may not involve the same kinds of problems.
Answering your original question would require detailed knowledge about such communes, while most poly people are more focused on solving the kinds of relationship problems that pop up in their own lives.
You’re right, I overextended myself in what I wrote. What I meant was: I’m aware of long-term successful communities practicing monogamy, and long-term somewhat successful communities practicing limited polygyny—i.e. cases where we can reasonably conclude that the overall utility is positive. I’m not aware of long-term successful communities practicing other forms such as full polyamory (which may well be my own ignorance).
The fact that a small group of bay-area twentysomethings has been successfully practicing polyamory for a few years does not convince me that the overall utility of polyamory is positive. That’s because with ’60s hippie communes my understanding is that a small group of bay-area twentysomethings were successfully practicing polyamory for a few years, but eventually various “black swan”-type events (bwim events analogous to stock market crashes, but for utility rather than economic value) occurred, and it turns out the overall utility of those communes was negative despite the positive early years. If today’s polyamorists want to convince me that “this time is different” they would have some work to do.
(I’m not an expert on the history. It’s entirely possible I’m simply wrong, in which case I’d appreciate pointers to well-written popular accounts that are more accurate than the ones I’m currently basing my judgement on).
It still sounds like you’re talking about poly as if it was a coherent whole, when it’s really lots and lots of different things, some with a longer history than others. Take a look at this map, for instance—and note that many of the non-monogamous behaviors may overlap with ostensibly monogamous practices. E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, (EDIT: removed questionable prevalence figure) basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others. Similarly, for everything else in that map, you could find reports from different people (either contemporary people or historical figures) who’ve done something like it, with it having been a good idea for some, and a bad idea for others.
I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say “well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they’re trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them”, without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation. For example, in Is Polyamory a Choice?, Michael Carey writes:
Meanwhile, there are some people whose innate personality traits make it very difficult to live happily in a monogamous relationship but relatively easy to be happy in an open one. [...] But there are almost certainly also some “obligate” non-monogamists who would never feel emotionally satisfied and healthy in a monogamous relationship, any more than a gay man would be satisfied and healthy in a straight marriage. [...] My experience suggests that perhaps half to two-thirds of polyamorists—those who want to be able to fully embrace multiple loving relationships, with sex as merely part of that (albeit an important part, just as it is in monogamous relationships)—are “obligate poly.” I’ve heard a lot of stories from people about having a few miserable monogamous relationships before they were introduced to the concept of honest, consensual non-monogamy.
I’ve also personally ran into cases of “naturally poly” people, who couldn’t prevent themselves from falling into love with multiple people at once, and who were utterly miserable if they had to kill those emotions: if they wanted to stay monogamous, they would have been forced to practically stop having any close friendships with people of the sexes that they were attracted to. For those people, it seems obvious that some kind of non-monogamous arrangement is the only kind of relationship in which they can ever feel really happy. (I don’t need to find an example of a visible community that has successfully practiced large-scale polyamory in order to realize that this kind of a person would be miserable in a monogamous arrangement.) At the same time, I also know of people are not only utterly incapable of loving more than one person, but also quite jealous: for those people, it seems obvious that a monogamous relationship is the right one.
Then there are people who are neither clearly poly nor clearly mono (I currently count myself as belonging to this category). For them the best choice requires some experimentation and probably also depends on the circumstances, e.g. if they fall in love with a clearly poly person, then a poly relationship might work best, but so might a mono relationship if they fell in love with someone who was very monogamous.
Then there are people who don’t necessarily experience romantic attraction to others, but also don’t experience much sexual jealousy and feel like having sex with others would just spice up the relationship they have with their primary partner: they might want to try out e.g. swinging. And so on.
E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, claims that some experts believe that there could be as many 15 million Americans swinging on a regular basis, and basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others.
I don’t believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles—“experts say”, “some experts think”, etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open.
Slightly better are ‘estimates’ (or was it ‘a study’?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that’s also quoted as ‘2-4m’ (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being ‘the BDSM and swing communities’, which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can’t even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.
Fair point—the exact number wasn’t very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the “couples” to include “non-married couples”, and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn’t sound too unreasonable.)
I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say “well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they’re trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them”, without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation.
I think the argument goes through the same way though. I understand your position to be: a culture in which a variety of different relationships are accepted and respected (among both leaders and ordinary citizens), and LW-style polyamory is one of those many varieties, can be stable, productive, and generally successful and high-utility. The question remains: why don’t we see historical examples of such societies? While you’re right that even nominally monogamous societies usually tolerate some greater or lesser degree of non-monogamous behavior, the kind of polyamory practiced by some prominent LW members is, I think, without such precedent, and would be condemned in all historically successful societies (including, I think, contemporary american society; while we don’t imprison people for it, I don’t think we’d elect a leader who openly engaged in such relationships, for example).
Yes, there’s a small self-selecting bay area community which operates in the way you describe. But I don’t think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.
Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices.
But then there’s also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women’s sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn’t want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies… which does seem to be case.
But I don’t think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.
What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn’t count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.
Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices.
I don’t think I would necessarily expect that.
Of course, it depends a lot on what we mean by “large scale”. A society with a 5% Buddhist minority can still have large-scale Buddhist practice (e.g., millions of people practicing Buddhism in a public and generally accepted way). I would say some U.S. states are visibly adopting homosexual practices (e.g. same-sex marriage) on a large scale, despite it being very much a minority option, for example.
In the absence of any other social forces pushing people towards nominally exclusive monogamy/monoandry (and heterosexuality, come to that) I would expect something like that kind of heterogeneity for natural inclinations.
Of course, in the real world those social forces exist and are powerful, so my expectations change accordingly.
But then there’s also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women’s sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn’t want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies… which does seem to be case.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse there. If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn’t that suggest there’s a good reason for it?
What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn’t count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship.
My impression is the reverse. Breakups tend to be sharply painful, but the wounds heal in a matter of months or at most a few years. But if you’re unwilling to consider breakups, being in a miserable relationship is for the rest of your life.
If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn’t that suggest there’s a good reason for it?
Sure—it was probably a natural adaptation to the level of contraception, healthcare, and overall wealth available at the time. Doesn’t mean it would be a good idea anymore.
And if you wish to reinstate patriarchy, then singling out polyamory as a suspicious modern practice seems rather arbitrary. There’s a lot of bigger stuff that you’d want to consider changing, like whether women are allowed to vote… or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.
That sounds unlikely in the general case (though there are definitely some spectacularly messy break-ups where that is true), but of course it depends on your utility function.
or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
I think that happens; it’s hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional “supportive wife” role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill’s position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders’ relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don’t think that’s irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do.
(on the voting analogy: I’d be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don’t think that’s an argument against women having the vote (they’re stereotypically less warlike—although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn’t’ve occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s—which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising—I guess that’s evidence against this position)
actual concern: where the money goes, any secrets the organization keeps, clarity of the leadership hierarchy,
Sure, I think these are legitimate.
Actually, I think this periodic “cult” angst distracts attention from a far more interesting question: “do contributions to MIRI actually accomplish anything worthwhile?” (Of which “Is MIRI a scam?” is a narrow subset, and not the most interesting subset at that, though still far more interesting than “Is LW a cult?”.)
Admittedly, I have the same problem with most non-profit organizations, but I agree that financial and organizational transparency is important across the board. (That said, I have no idea how MIRI’s transparency compares to, say, the National Stroke Foundation’s, or the Democratic National Committee’s.)
actual concern: [...] overuse of fiction I think the use of fictional evidence is actually dangerous.
Hm.
So, just to clarify our terms a little… there’s a difference between fictional evidence on the one hand (that is, treating depictions of fictional events as though they were actual observations of the depicted events), and creating fictional examples to clearly and compellingly articulate a theory or call attention to an idea on the other.
The latter, in and of itself, I think is harmless. Do you disagree? The former is dangerous, in that it can lead to false beliefs, and I suppose I agree that any use of fiction (including reading it for fun) increases my chances of unintentionally using it as evidence.
So I guess the question is, are we using fiction as evidence? Or are we using it as a shortcut to convey complicated ideas? And if it’s a bit of both, as I expect, then it’s (as you say) a question of where the balance is.
So, OK. You clearly believe the balance here swings too far to “fiction as evidence,” which might be true, and is an important problem if true. What observations convinced you of this?
More tangentially:
if there are good answers to [..] “why do you expect polyamory to turn out better for you lot than it did for the ’60s hippie communes” it’d be nice to see them
Well, ultimately my answer to this is that a lot of my friends are in poly relationships, and it seems to be working for them all right. This is also why I expect same-sex marriages to turn out OK, why I expect marriages between different races to turn out OK, why I expect people remaining single to turn out OK, and so forth.
Am I ignoring the example of 60s hippy communes? Well, maybe. I don″t know that much about them, really. The vague impression I get is that they were a hell of a lot more coercive than I would endorse.
If MIRI folks are going around getting into coercive relationships (which is pretty common for people generally), I object to that, whether those relationships are poly or mono or kinky or vanilla or whatever. If MIRI folks are differentially getting into coercive relationships (that is, significantly more so than people generally), that’s a serious concern. Are they?
Mostly, my rule of thumb about such things is that it’s important for a relationship to support individuals in that relationship in what they individually want and don’t want. Monogamous people in poly relationships suffer. Polygamous people in mono relationships suffer. Etc.
Also that it’s important for a community to support individuals in their relationship choices (which includes the choice to get out of a relationship).
So I guess the question is, are we using fiction as evidence? Or are we using it as a shortcut to convey complicated ideas? And if it’s a bit of both, as I expect, then it’s (as you say) a question of where the balance is. So, OK. You clearly believe the balance here swings too far to “fiction as evidence,” which might be true, and is an important problem if true. What observations convinced you of this?
All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction—using fiction to convey serious ideas—are organizations/movements I have negative views of. One thinks of Ayn Rand, those people who take Gor seriously (assuming they’re not just an internet joke), the Pilgrim’s Progress. Trying to cast my net wider, I felt the part of The Republic where Plato tells a story about a city to be weak, I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism. Monopoly is an entertaining board game (well, not a very entertaining one to be honest) but I don’t think it teaches us anything about capitalism.
I’ve been highly frustrated by the use of “parables” here like the dragon of death or the capricious king of poverty; it seems like the writers use them as a rhetorical trick, allowing them to pretend they’ve made a point that they haven’t in fact made, simply because it’s true in their story.
I am genuinely struggling to think of any positive-for-the-political-side examples of this kind of fiction.
Well, ultimately my answer to this is that a lot of my friends are in poly relationships, and it seems to be working for them all right. This is also why I expect same-sex marriages to turn out OK, why I expect marriages between different races to turn out OK, why I expect people remaining single to turn out OK, and so forth.
I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked (beyond limited polygyny in patriarchal societies, which evidently does “work” on some level) I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don’t (maybe I’m not looking hard enough). Being single clearly works for many people. Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren’t allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work. Widespread interracial marriage simply wasn’t possible before the development of modern transport technology, so there’s no mystery about the lack of historical successes. Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing… hmm, that’s actually a good answer. I shall reconsider.
if poly relationships worked [..] I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory... Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren’t allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work
So, when marriage traditionalists argue that the absence of an established tradition of same-sex marriages is evidence that same-sex marriage isn’t likely to work (since if it did, they’d expect to see an established tradition of same-sex marriage), you don’t find that convincing… your position there is that: a) marriage is just a special case of long-term, stable relationship, and b) we do observe an established (if unofficial, and often actively derided) tradition of long-term, stable same-sex relationships among the small fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships, so c) we should expect same-sex marriages to work among that fraction of the population.
Yes?
But by contrast, on your account we don’t observe an established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships, so a similar argument does not suffice to justify expecting multi-adult marriages to work among the fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships.
You’ve accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don’t yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don’t see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple’s suitability to adopt).
I think we may need to taboo “work” here; if we’re talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that’s a higher standard than just enjoying one’s own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society—Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I’m British/Irish).
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional.
Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it’s not clear to me that there’s ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein’s idea of line marriages working out.
The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects—promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences.
I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average.
A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.
Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven’t investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.
Where I’m going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do.
My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so.
EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren’t just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren’t making “major contributions to wider society” just as some gay people were. But I don’t have examples to point out.
I would be very surprised if there weren’t….a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse
Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.
Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.
Right. As I’ve said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.
Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn’t definitive… maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions… sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs.
I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.
All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction—using fiction to convey serious ideas—are organizations/movements I have negative views of.
Just to pick a somewhat arbitrary example I was thinking about recently… have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?
Does it qualify as what you’re calling “political fiction”?
Do you associate it with any particular organizations/movements?
By happy coincidence I also read it recently. I’ve not seen it used to make political/philosophical arguments, so I don’t class it as such. To my mind the ending and indeed the whole story is more ambiguous than the examples I’ve been thinking of; if the intent was to push a particular view then it failed, at least in my case. (By contrast Brave New World probably did influence my view of utilitarianism, despite my best efforts to remain unmoved).
If I saw someone using it to argue for a position I’d probably think less of it or them, and on a purely aesthetic level I found it disappointing.
I guess maybe Permutation City is a positive example; it provides a useful explicit example of some things we want to make philosophical arguments about. Maybe because I felt it wasn’t making a value judgement—it was more like, well, scientific fiction.
Thinking about this some more, and rereading this thread, I’m realizing I’m more confused than I’d thought I was.
Initially, when you introduced the term “political fiction,” you glossed it as “using fiction to convey serious ideas.” Which is similar enough to what I had in mind that I was happy to use that phrase.
But then you say that you don’t class Omelas in this category, because it doesn’t successfully push a particular view. Which suggests that the category you have in mind isn’t just about conveying ideas, but rather about pushing a particular philosophical/political perspective—yes?
But then you say that you do class Permutation City in this category (and I would agree), and you approve of it. This actually surprises me… I would have thought, given what you’d said earlier, that you would object to PC on the grounds that it simply asserts a fictional universe in which various things are true, and could be misused as evidence that those things are in fact true in the real world. I’m glad you aren’t making that argument, as it suggests our views are actually closer than I’d originally thought (I would agree that it’s possible to misuse PC that way, as it is possible to misuse other fictional ideas, but that’s a separate issue).
And you further explain that PC isn’t making a value judgment… but that you still consider it an example of political fiction… which is consistent with your original definition of the term… but I don’t know how to reconcile it with your description of Omelas.
I’m trying to explore this as we go along; it’s very possible I’ve been incoherent.
I don’t class Omelas in any of these categories category because I’ve never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all.
Permutation City was an example I only thought of in the last post. Fundamentally I feel like it belongs in a different cluster from these other examples (including the LW ones) - I’m trying to understand why, and I was suggesting that the value judgements might be the difference, but that’s little more than a guess.
I don’t class Omelas in any of these categories category because I’ve never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all.
Well… OK. Let’s change that.
Omelas is a good illustration of the intuitive problems with a straight-up total-utilitarian approach to ethical philosophy. It’s clear that by any coherent metric, the benefits enjoyed as a consequence of that child’s suffering far outweigh the costs of that suffering. Nevertheless, the intuitive judgment of most people is that there’s something very wrong with this picture and that alleviating the child’s suffering would be a good thing.
OK… now that you’ve seen Omelas used to in a discussion about utilitarian moral philosophy, does your judgment about the story change?
Hmm. I was not fond of the story in any case, so this use would need to be particularly bad to diminish my opinion of it.
The fundamental lack of realism in the story now seems more important. Where before I was happy to suspend disbelief on the implausibility of a town that worked that way, if we’re going to apply actual philosophy it I find myself wanting a more rigorous explanation of how things work—why do people believe that comforting the child would damage the city?
Do I think using the story has made the discussion worse? Maybe; it’s hard to compare to a control in the specific instance. But I think in the general, average case philosophical discussions that use fictional examples turn out less well than those that don’t.
If I thought the use of the story had damaged the discussion, would that make me think less of the story or author? I think my somewhat weaselly (and nonutilitarian) answer is that intent matters here. If I discovered that a story I liked was actually intended allegorically, I think I’d think less of it (and to a certain extent this happened with Animal Farm, which I read naively at an early age and less naively a few years later, and thought less of it the second time). But if someone just happens to use a story I like in a philosophical argument, without there being anything inherent to the story or author that invited this kind of use, I don’t think that would change my opinion.
From my perspective, Omelas does a fine job of doing what I’m claiming fiction is useful for in these sorts of discussions… it makes it easy to refer to a scenario that illustrates a point that would otherwise be far more complicated to even define.
For example, I can, in a conversation about total-utilitarianism, say “Well, so what if anything is wrong with Omelas?” to you, and you can tell me whether you think there’s anything wrong with Omelas and if so what, and we’ve communicated a lot more efficiently than if we hadn’t both read the story.
Similarly, around LW I can refer to something as an Invisible Dragon in the Garage and that clarifies what might otherwise be a hopelessly muddled conversation.
Now, you’re certainly right that while having identified a position is a necessary first step to defending that position, those are two different thigns, and that soemtimes people use fiction to do the former and then act as though they’d done the latter when they haven’t.
This is a mistake.
(Also, since you bring it up, I consider Brave New World far too complicated a story to serve very well in this role… there’s too much going on. Which is a good thing for fiction, and I endorse it utterly, since the primary function of fiction for me is not to provide useful shortcuts in discussions. However, some fiction performs this function and I think that’s a fine thing too.)
I think there is a good deal to be said for the interpretation according to which many of the features of the “ideal” city Socrates describes in Republic are intended to work on the biases of Glaucon and Adeimantus (and those like them) and not intended to actually represent an ideal city. Admittedly, Laws does seem to be intended to describe how Plato thinks a city should be run, so it seems that Plato had some pretty terrible political ideas (at least at the end; Laws is his last work, and I prefer to think his mind was starting to go), but nonetheless it’s not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato.
I completely agree that Brave New World seems unhelpful in evaluating utilitarianism.
it’s not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato.
Which is I think the fundamental problem with this kind of political fiction. It allows people to present ideas and implications without committing to them or providing evidence (or alternately, making it clear that this is an opposing view that they are not endorsing). But then at a later stage they go on to treat the things that happened in their fiction as things they’d proven.
I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism.
Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism: the Fordian society’s willingness to treat people as specialized components may not be as immediately terrifying as 1984, but it’s still intentionally disutopian. My apologies if I’m misreading your statement, but many folk don’t get that from reading the book in a classroom environment.
I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked… I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don’t (maybe I’m not looking hard enough).
Some subcultures have different expectations of exclusivity, which may be meaningful here even if not true polyamory.
Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing...
Communication availability and different economic situations, as well. The mainstream entrance of women into the work force as self-sustaining individuals is a fairly new thing, and the availability of instant always-on communication even more recent.
EDIT: I agree that there are structural concerns if a sufficient portion of the leadership are both poly and in a connected relationship, but this has to do more with network effects than polyamory. The availability and expenditures of money are likely to trigger the same network effect issues regardless of poly stuff.
Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism
Yes. I thought it would be clear that I knew that, since I don’t think my statement makes any sense otherwise?
I found Brave New World, in so far as it is taken as an illustration of a philosophical point, actively unhelpful; that is, its existence is detrimental to the quality of philosophical discussions about the merits of utilitarianism (basically for all the usual reasons that fictional evidence is bad; it leads people to assume that a utilitarian society would behave in a certain way, or that certain behaviors would have certain outcomes, simply because that was what happened in Brave New World).
(Independently, I found it interesting and enjoyable as a work of fiction).
My cynical view is: write some papers about how the problems they need to solve are really hard; write enough papers each year to appear to be making progress, and live lives of luxury.
I think this fine if the papers are good. It’s routine in academic research that somebody says “I’m working on curing cancer.” And then it turns out that they’re really studying one little gene that’s related to some set of cancers. In general, it’s utterly normal in the academy that somebody announces dramatic goal A, and then really works on subproblem D that might ultimately help achieve C, and then B, an important special case of A.
When founding the first police force, one of Peel’s key principles was that the only way they could be evaluated was the prevalence of crime—not how much work the police were seen to be doing, not how good the public felt about their efforts. It’s very hard to find a similar standard with which to hold LW to account.
The standard I would use is “are there a significant number of people who find the papers interesting and useful?” And that’s a standard that I think MIRI is improving significantly on. A large fraction of academics with tenure in top-50 computer science departments aren’t work that’s better.
Notice that I wouldn’t use “avoid UFAI danger” as a metric. If the MIRI people are motivated to answer interesting questions about decision theory and coordination between agents-who-can-read-source-code, I think they’re doing worthwhile work.
Notice that I wouldn’t use “avoid UFAI danger” as a metric. If the MIRI people are motivated to answer interesting questions about decision theory and coordination between agents-who-can-read-source-code, I think they’re doing worthwhile work.
Worthwhile? Maybe. But it seems dishonest to collect donations that are purportedly for avoiding UFAI danger if they don’t actually result in avoiding UFAI danger.
Things I worry about:
Some members make large donations
There is secret knowledge that you pay for (ai-box)
Members do some kooky things (cryonics, polyamory)
Members claim “rationality” has helped them lose weight or sleep better—subject things without controls—rather than something more measurable and where a mechanism is more obvious.
At least one thing is not supposed to be discussed in public (banned memetic hazard). LW members seem significantly kookier when talking about this (and in the original deleted thread) than on more public subjects.
Members have a lot of jargon. It can seem like they’re speaking their own language. More, there’s a bunch of literature embedded in the organization’s worldview; publicly this is treated as simple fiction, but internally it’s clearly taken more seriously.
Although there’s no explicit severing advice, LW encourages (in practice if not in theory) members to act in ways that reduce their out-of-group friendships
The hierarchy is opaque; it feels like there is a clique of high-level users, but this is not public.
Wouldn’t you expect that if the cause actually made sense though? (and not only if this is a cult)
Less than 0.01% of the users have played an ai-box game (to my knowledge) and even less have played it for money.
Again fairly small subset for the first thing, slightly larger for the second but I guess I will give you that one.
Probably a tiny subset of users claim that—I personally have never seen anyone claim that rationality helped them sleep better and if you mean that evidence-based reasoning helped them find an intervention designed to increase sleep quality you are grasping for straws.
We are not supposed to write out the actual basilisk (there is only one) on lesswrong.com. There is no problems with talking about it in public and again this affects a tiny portion of users.
Giving you this one as well.
Bullshit.
There are just respected users and no clear-cut hierarchy—that’s what happens at most places. For a proxy of who is a high-level user look at the ‘Top Contributors’.
This sort of point-by-point refutation is the same sort of thing that would happen in a church that was trying to defend against allegations of cultyness.
I don’t think lmm’s list of reasons was utterly compelling—good, but not utterly compelling—but I don’t think it would matter if it were a perfect list, because there will always be a defense for accusations of cultyness that satisfies the church/forum.
It is more interesting watching it happen here vs. the church IMO because LW is all about rationality, where the church can always push the “faith” button when they are backed into a logical corner.
At the end of the day, it is just an online forum. But it does sound to me (based on what I can gather from perusing) like there are a group of people here who take this stuff seriously enough so as to make cultyness possible.
I’m sure the “LW/cryonics/transhumanism/basilisk stuff is so similar to how religion works” bit got old a long time ago, but Dear Lord is it apparent and fascinating to me.
Ah, the perennial dilemma of how to respond to an accusation of cultiness. If one bothers to rebut it: that’s exactly what a cult would do! If one doesn’t rebut it: oh, the accusation must be unanswerable and hence true!
I completely understand. And I know mine is pretty cheap reasoning. But it just reminds me of what happens in a similar situation in the church. Feel free to ignore it. As I said, I’m confident it has probably been played out by now. I’m satisfied just to watch in awe.
Given how much LWers seem to care about effective charity, I’d expect more scrutiny, and a stronger insistence on measurable outcomes. I guess you’re right though; the money isn’t inherently a problem.
It seems like a defining characteristic; it’s one place where the site clearly differs from more “mainstream” AI research (though this may be a distorted perception since it was how I first heard of LW)
Shrug. It looks dodgy to me. It pattern-matches with e.g. the unverifiable stories people tell of their personal experience of Jesus.
That’s not at all clear. I’ve never seen any explicit rules. I’ve seen articles that carefully avoid saying the name.
Even on internet forums there’s usually an explicit distinction between mod and not, and often layers to it. (The one exception I know is HN, and even there people know who pg is, who’s part of YC and who’s not, and stories are presented differently if they’re coming from YC members). And it’s unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other. It raises questions over objectivity, oversight, conflict resolution.
It’s not. Your view is definitely distorted.
..
Look around then? Eliezer has even made a Reddit thread for things like that where the basilisk is freely discussed.
Yeah, and people here know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is and who is part of MIRI which is LW’s parent organization..
I’m not active on reddit. Most forums have a link to the rules right next to the comment box; this one does not. There clearly is a chilling effect going on, because I’ve seen posts that make carefully oblique references to memetic hazards rather than just saying “don’t post the basilisk in the comments please”.
I have no idea who’s part of MIRI and which posts are or aren’t from MIRI, because we don’t do the equivalent of (YC 09) on stories here. (And HN was explicitly the worst other example I know; they could certainly stand to improve their transparency a lot).
By “first-name terms with each other”, do you mean something more than the literal meaning of “familiar with someone, such that one can address that person by his or her first name”? Because in my experience, treating other users on a first name basis is the default for all users on many Internet forums, LW included.
I meant “talk about each other as if they’re close personal friends”. (Myself I generally try to avoid using first names for people who aren’t such, but I appreciate that that’s probably a cultural difference).
I think this is more due to the number of people who have their real name as their LessWrong username than any sinister cabal.
Don’t forget that much of the inner circle actually draws a paycheck from the organizations members are encouraged to donate to, and supposedly a fairly large one at that, and that the discussion of how much to donate is framed in terms of averting the destruction of the human race.
That and the polyamory commune are the two sketchiest things IMO, since it shows that the inner circle is materially and directly benefiting from the “altruism” / “rationality” of lower ranking members.
This is a good website, mostly good people on it, but there’s also an impression that there are questionable dealings going on behind the scenes.
Would LW be improved if paid employees/consultants of those organizations were barred from membership? (I do realize there are other ways to address this concern, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise… for example, we could re-institute the moratorium on discussing those organizations, or a limited moratorium on fundraising activitiies here, or various other things. I’m just curious about your opinion about that specific solution.)
I get a kick out of this, because my social circle is largely polyamorous but would mostly consider LW a charming bunch of complete nutjobs on other grounds. Polyamory really isn’t all that uncommon in communities anchored around high-tech development/elite tech schools, IME.
No, I suspect it would die. Actionable suggestion though: some kind of “badge” / note (along the lines of the “mod” or “author” tag you get in Disqus, for example). When I worked for a company with user forums it was policy that all staff had badges on their avatars and you should not post from a non-staff account while employed by the company.
That is very surprising, very different from my experiences. My social circle comes mainly from the University of Cambridge and the London tech scene; I am friends with several furries, more transsexuals, and have had dinner with the maintainer of the BDSM FAQ. Polyamory still seems fucking weird (not offensive or evil, but naive and pretentious, and correlated with what I can probably best summarize as the stoner stereotype). I’ve met a couple of openly poly people and they were perfectly friendly and had the best of intentions but I wouldn’t trust them to organize my closet, yet alone the survival of humanity.
I originally took Moss_Piglet to imply that the leadership were recruiting groupies from LW to have sex with. That I would find very disturbing and offputting. Assuming that’s not an issue, I think the weirdness of the polyamory would be amply countered by evidence of general competence / life success.
Wth? You seem very prejudiced. What makes people who have multiple relationships this much less trustworthy than ‘normal’ people to you (that you wouldn’t even trust them to organize your closet)?
This whole subject is about prejudice; we judge organizations for their cultlike characteristics without investigating them in detail.
I think I was unclear: the implication runs in the opposite direction. All the specific poly individuals I’ve met are people I wouldn’t trust to organize my closet, in terms of general life competence (e.g. ability to hold down a job, finish projects they start, keep promises to friends). As a result, when I find out that someone is poly, I consider this evidence (in the Bayesian sense) that they’re incompetent, the same way I would adjust my estimate of someone’s competence if I discovered that they had particular academic qualifications or used a particular drug. (Obviously all these factors are screened off if I have direct evidence about their actual competence level).
To throw in a possibly-relevant factor: age.
It seems to me that polyamory in early twenties is quite different from polyamory in late forties.
Well, I would certainly agree with this. The poly folk I know in their 40s are as a class more successful in their relationships than the poly folk I know in their 20s.
Of course, this is true of the mono folk I know, also.
Which is what I would expect if experience having relationships increased one’s ability to do so successfully.
It also agrees with the experience from my real-life social circles, which are dominated by university people from the Helsinki region. Poly seems to be treated as roughly the same as homosexuality: unusual but not particularly noteworthy one way or the other. Treatments in the popular press (articles about some particular poly triad who’s agreed to be interviewed, etc.) are also generally positive.
(nods) Fair enough. My experience is limited to the U.S. in this context.
I agree that “recruiting groupies to have sex with,” if I understand what you mean by the phrase, would be disturbing and offputting.
Moss_Piglet appears to believe that polyamory is in and of itself a bad sign, independent of whether any groupies are being recruited. Beyond that, I decline to speculate.
The ethics of conflicts of interest in the media are pretty well-trodden ground; you could adapt any journalistic ethics document into a comprehensive do’s and don’ts list. Do state your financial interests clearly and publicly, don’t mix advertising and information content, etc.
It’s not foolproof and bias is universal, but a conflict of interest on the scale of one’s career and sex life is something a rationalist ought to be at least a little concerned about.
That may well be true, but it makes little difference. The collapse of sexual mores is directly, IMO causally, linked with decreased stability and fertility; letting it take hold in the highest IQ sections of the population is a recipe for disaster. Engaging in that sort of behavior is strong evidence against a person’s character as a leader.
That’s a silly assertion. First because it’s obviously only true from the point of view of a specific morality. And second, because it ignores the empirical fact that, in full compliance with biology, powerful male leaders usually bed many women.
Actually, that sounds like a great idea. I would absolutely endorse a policy along those lines.
Ah, I see.
Sure, if I believed that failing to conform to previously established sexual mores led to decreased stability, I would no doubt agree that the poly aspects of LW and its various parent organizations were troubling.
Similar things are true of my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc.
Come to that, I suppose similar things are true of my state government, which accepts my marriage to my husband as a family despite this being a clear violation of pre-existing sexual mores, and of large chunks of my country, which accepts marriages between people of different skin colors as families despite this being a clear violation of the sexual mores of a few decades ago.
I’d prefer not to completely derail this into a political/moral argument, since the issue at hand is a bit more relevant. Since you are, as you admit, fairly invested in your position there is little purpose to debate on this point except to distract from the main issue.
Sure; I have no interest in debating with you whether polyamory, homosexuality, miscegenation and other violations of sexual mores really are harmful. As you say, it would be a distraction.
My point was that if they were, it would make sense to object to an organization on the grounds that its leadership approves of/engages in harmful sexual-more-violating activities. What would not make sense is to differentially object to that organization on those grounds.
That is, accepting/endorsing/engaging sexual-more-violating activities might make LW’s parent organizations dangerous, but it doesn’t make them any more dangerous than many far-more-mainstream organizations that do the same things (like my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc).
If this one of the two sketchiest things about the organization, as you suggest, it sounds to me like the organization is pretty darned close to the mainstream, which seems rather opposed to the point lmm was trying to make, and which I originally inferred you were aligning with.
Don’t forget treating the writings of the charismatic founder as a sacred text and ritually quoting them :-)
Cool… this sort of thing is far more actionable than “seeming like a cult.”
So, next question. Taking you as representative of the group (which is of course not necessarily true, but we start from where we are)… what is your sense of where each of these falls on the spectrum between “this is legitimately worrying; in order to be less at risk for actual bad consequences LW should actually change so as not to do this” on the one hand, and “this is merely superficially worrying; there are probably no real risks here and LW should merely take steps to reassure worriers not to worry about it”?
I’m legitimately worried about the money and the incentives it creates. What would a self-interested agent (LW seems to use “agent” in exactly the opposite sense to what I’d expect it to mean, but I hope I’m clear) in the position of the LW leadership do? My cynical view is: write some papers about how the problems they need to solve are really hard; write enough papers each year to appear to be making progress, and live lives of luxury. So what’s stopping them? People in charities that provide far more fuzzies than LW have become disenchanted. People far dumber than Yudkowsky have found rationalizations to live well for themselves on the dime of the charity they run. Corrupt priests of every generation have professed as much faith that performing their actual mission would result in very high future utility, while in fact neglecting those duties for earthly pleasures.
Even if none of the leadership are blowing funds on crack and hookers, if they’re all just living ascetically and writing papers, that’s actually the same failure mode if they’re not being effective at preventing UFAI. When founding the first police force, one of Peel’s key principles was that the only way they could be evaluated was the prevalence of crime—not how much work the police were seen to be doing, not how good the public felt about their efforts. It’s very hard to find a similar standard with which to hold LW to account.
It occurs to me as I write that I have no idea what the LW funding structure is—whether the site is funded by the CFAR, MIRI, SIAI or something else. Even having all these distinct bodies with mostly the same members smells fishy, seems more likely to be politics than practicalities.
The kookiness… if LW were really more rational than others, I’d expect them to do some weird-but-not-harmful-to-others things. So I suspect this is more a perception than reality thing (Though if there are good answers to “what’s the empirical distinction between real and fake cryonics” and “why do you expect polyamory to turn out better for you lot than it did for the ’60s hippie communes” it’d be nice to see them). IMO the prime counter would be visible effectiveness. A rich person with some weird habits is an eccentric genius; a poor person with weird habits is just a crank.
It would be really nice to have more verifiable results that say LW-style rationality is good for people (or to know that it isn’t and respond accordingly). The failure mode here is that we do a bunch of things that feel good and pat each other on the back and actually it’s all placebos. We actually see a fair few articles here claiming that reading LW is bad for you, or that rationality doesn’t make people happier. On thinking it through this would be the kind of cult that’s basically harmless, so I’m not too concerned. On the perception side, IMO discussing health is not worth the damage it does to the way the community is seen (the first weight-loss thread I saw caused a palpable drop in my confidence in the site). I’ve no idea how to practically move away from doing so though.
Secrets and bans rub me very strongly the wrong way, and seem likely to damage our efforts in nonobvious ways (to put it another way, secretive organizations tend to become ineffective at their original aims, and I’m worried about this failure mode). I certainly don’t think the ban on the basilisk is effective at its purported aim, given that it’s still talked about on the internet. And just having this kind of deception around immediately sets off a whole chain of other doubts—what if it’s banned for other reasons? What else is banned?
If there really is a need for these bans, there should be a clear set of rules and some kind of review. That would certainly address the perception, and hopefully the actuality too.
I think the use of fictional evidence is actually dangerous. Given the apparently high value of LW-memetic fiction in recruiting, I don’t know where the balance is. I think overuse of jargon is just a perceptual problem (though probably worth addressing).
I have… unusual views on diversity, so I don’t think setting people against their less-rational friends is an actual problem (in the sense of being damaging to the organization’s aims); I file this as a perceptual problem. The most obvious counter I can think of is more politeness about common popular misbeliefs, and less condescension when correcting each other. But I suspect these are problems inherent to internet fora (which doesn’t mean they’re not real; I would suggest that e.g. reddit has a (minor) cultish aspect to it, one that’s offputting to participation. But there may not be any counter).
The hierarchy: in the short term it’s merely annoying, but long-term I worry about committee politics. If some of the higher-ups fell out in private (and given that several of them appear to be dating each other that seems likely) and began sniping at each other in the course of their duties, and catching innocent users in the crossfire… I’ve seen that happen in similar organizations and be very damaging. Actual concern.
So in summary: actual concern: where the money goes, any secrets the organization keeps, clarity of the leadership hierarchy, overuse of fiction. superficial issues: overuse of jargon. The rest of my list is on reflection probably not worth worrying about.
MIRI and SIAI are the same organization: SIAI is MIRI’s old name, now no longer used because people kept confusing the Singularity Institute and Singularity University.
(AFAIK, LW has traditionally been funded by MIRI, but I’m not sure how the MIRI/CFAR split has affected this.)
One might as well ask “why do you expect monogamy to turn out better than it did for all the people who have gone through a series of dysfunctional relationships”. Being in any kind of relationship is difficult, and some relationships will always be unsuccessful. Furthermore, just as there are many kinds of monogamous relationships—from the straight lovers who have been together since high school, to the remarried gay couple with a 20-year age difference, to the arranged marriage who’ve gradually grown to love each other and who practice BDSM—there are many kinds of polyamorous relationships, and the failure modes of one may or may not be relevant for another.
If you specify “the kinds of relationships practiced in the hippie communes of the sixties”, you’re not just specifying a polyamorous relationship style, you’re also specifying a large list of other cultural norms—just as saying “conventional marriages in the 1950′s United States” singles out a much narrower set of relationship behaviors than just “monogamy”, and “conventional marriages among middle class white people in the 1950′s United States” even more so.
And we haven’t even said anything about the personalities of the people in question—the kinds of people who end up moving to hippie communes are likely to represent a very particular set of personality types, each of which may make them more susceptible to some kinds of problems and more resistant to others. Other poly people may or may not represent the same personality types, so their relationships may or may not involve the same kinds of problems.
Answering your original question would require detailed knowledge about such communes, while most poly people are more focused on solving the kinds of relationship problems that pop up in their own lives.
You’re right, I overextended myself in what I wrote. What I meant was: I’m aware of long-term successful communities practicing monogamy, and long-term somewhat successful communities practicing limited polygyny—i.e. cases where we can reasonably conclude that the overall utility is positive. I’m not aware of long-term successful communities practicing other forms such as full polyamory (which may well be my own ignorance).
The fact that a small group of bay-area twentysomethings has been successfully practicing polyamory for a few years does not convince me that the overall utility of polyamory is positive. That’s because with ’60s hippie communes my understanding is that a small group of bay-area twentysomethings were successfully practicing polyamory for a few years, but eventually various “black swan”-type events (bwim events analogous to stock market crashes, but for utility rather than economic value) occurred, and it turns out the overall utility of those communes was negative despite the positive early years. If today’s polyamorists want to convince me that “this time is different” they would have some work to do.
(I’m not an expert on the history. It’s entirely possible I’m simply wrong, in which case I’d appreciate pointers to well-written popular accounts that are more accurate than the ones I’m currently basing my judgement on).
It still sounds like you’re talking about poly as if it was a coherent whole, when it’s really lots and lots of different things, some with a longer history than others. Take a look at this map, for instance—and note that many of the non-monogamous behaviors may overlap with ostensibly monogamous practices. E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, (EDIT: removed questionable prevalence figure) basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others. Similarly, for everything else in that map, you could find reports from different people (either contemporary people or historical figures) who’ve done something like it, with it having been a good idea for some, and a bad idea for others.
I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say “well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they’re trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them”, without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation. For example, in Is Polyamory a Choice?, Michael Carey writes:
I’ve also personally ran into cases of “naturally poly” people, who couldn’t prevent themselves from falling into love with multiple people at once, and who were utterly miserable if they had to kill those emotions: if they wanted to stay monogamous, they would have been forced to practically stop having any close friendships with people of the sexes that they were attracted to. For those people, it seems obvious that some kind of non-monogamous arrangement is the only kind of relationship in which they can ever feel really happy. (I don’t need to find an example of a visible community that has successfully practiced large-scale polyamory in order to realize that this kind of a person would be miserable in a monogamous arrangement.) At the same time, I also know of people are not only utterly incapable of loving more than one person, but also quite jealous: for those people, it seems obvious that a monogamous relationship is the right one.
Then there are people who are neither clearly poly nor clearly mono (I currently count myself as belonging to this category). For them the best choice requires some experimentation and probably also depends on the circumstances, e.g. if they fall in love with a clearly poly person, then a poly relationship might work best, but so might a mono relationship if they fell in love with someone who was very monogamous.
Then there are people who don’t necessarily experience romantic attraction to others, but also don’t experience much sexual jealousy and feel like having sex with others would just spice up the relationship they have with their primary partner: they might want to try out e.g. swinging. And so on.
I don’t believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles—“experts say”, “some experts think”, etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open.
Slightly better are ‘estimates’ (or was it ‘a study’?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that’s also quoted as ‘2-4m’ (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being ‘the BDSM and swing communities’, which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can’t even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.
Fair point—the exact number wasn’t very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the “couples” to include “non-married couples”, and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn’t sound too unreasonable.)
I think the argument goes through the same way though. I understand your position to be: a culture in which a variety of different relationships are accepted and respected (among both leaders and ordinary citizens), and LW-style polyamory is one of those many varieties, can be stable, productive, and generally successful and high-utility. The question remains: why don’t we see historical examples of such societies? While you’re right that even nominally monogamous societies usually tolerate some greater or lesser degree of non-monogamous behavior, the kind of polyamory practiced by some prominent LW members is, I think, without such precedent, and would be condemned in all historically successful societies (including, I think, contemporary american society; while we don’t imprison people for it, I don’t think we’d elect a leader who openly engaged in such relationships, for example).
Yes, there’s a small self-selecting bay area community which operates in the way you describe. But I don’t think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.
Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices.
But then there’s also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women’s sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn’t want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies… which does seem to be case.
What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn’t count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.
In general agreed, but a quibble about:
I don’t think I would necessarily expect that.
Of course, it depends a lot on what we mean by “large scale”. A society with a 5% Buddhist minority can still have large-scale Buddhist practice (e.g., millions of people practicing Buddhism in a public and generally accepted way). I would say some U.S. states are visibly adopting homosexual practices (e.g. same-sex marriage) on a large scale, despite it being very much a minority option, for example.
In the absence of any other social forces pushing people towards nominally exclusive monogamy/monoandry (and heterosexuality, come to that) I would expect something like that kind of heterogeneity for natural inclinations.
Of course, in the real world those social forces exist and are powerful, so my expectations change accordingly.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse there. If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn’t that suggest there’s a good reason for it?
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.
My impression is the reverse. Breakups tend to be sharply painful, but the wounds heal in a matter of months or at most a few years. But if you’re unwilling to consider breakups, being in a miserable relationship is for the rest of your life.
Sure—it was probably a natural adaptation to the level of contraception, healthcare, and overall wealth available at the time. Doesn’t mean it would be a good idea anymore.
And if you wish to reinstate patriarchy, then singling out polyamory as a suspicious modern practice seems rather arbitrary. There’s a lot of bigger stuff that you’d want to consider changing, like whether women are allowed to vote… or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
That sounds unlikely in the general case (though there are definitely some spectacularly messy break-ups where that is true), but of course it depends on your utility function.
I think that happens; it’s hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional “supportive wife” role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill’s position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders’ relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don’t think that’s irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do.
(on the voting analogy: I’d be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don’t think that’s an argument against women having the vote (they’re stereotypically less warlike—although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn’t’ve occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s—which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising—I guess that’s evidence against this position)
There are many relationships where the “marginal” increase from not being in that relationship anymore far outweigh the downsides of the breakup.
Sure there are good reasons. Physical strength is one. Not being in a semi-permanent state of either pregnant or breast-feeding is another.
Sure, I think these are legitimate.
Actually, I think this periodic “cult” angst distracts attention from a far more interesting question: “do contributions to MIRI actually accomplish anything worthwhile?” (Of which “Is MIRI a scam?” is a narrow subset, and not the most interesting subset at that, though still far more interesting than “Is LW a cult?”.)
Admittedly, I have the same problem with most non-profit organizations, but I agree that financial and organizational transparency is important across the board. (That said, I have no idea how MIRI’s transparency compares to, say, the National Stroke Foundation’s, or the Democratic National Committee’s.)
Hm.
So, just to clarify our terms a little… there’s a difference between fictional evidence on the one hand (that is, treating depictions of fictional events as though they were actual observations of the depicted events), and creating fictional examples to clearly and compellingly articulate a theory or call attention to an idea on the other.
The latter, in and of itself, I think is harmless. Do you disagree?
The former is dangerous, in that it can lead to false beliefs, and I suppose I agree that any use of fiction (including reading it for fun) increases my chances of unintentionally using it as evidence.
So I guess the question is, are we using fiction as evidence? Or are we using it as a shortcut to convey complicated ideas? And if it’s a bit of both, as I expect, then it’s (as you say) a question of where the balance is.
So, OK. You clearly believe the balance here swings too far to “fiction as evidence,” which might be true, and is an important problem if true.
What observations convinced you of this?
More tangentially:
Well, ultimately my answer to this is that a lot of my friends are in poly relationships, and it seems to be working for them all right. This is also why I expect same-sex marriages to turn out OK, why I expect marriages between different races to turn out OK, why I expect people remaining single to turn out OK, and so forth.
Am I ignoring the example of 60s hippy communes? Well, maybe. I don″t know that much about them, really. The vague impression I get is that they were a hell of a lot more coercive than I would endorse.
If MIRI folks are going around getting into coercive relationships (which is pretty common for people generally), I object to that, whether those relationships are poly or mono or kinky or vanilla or whatever. If MIRI folks are differentially getting into coercive relationships (that is, significantly more so than people generally), that’s a serious concern.
Are they?
Mostly, my rule of thumb about such things is that it’s important for a relationship to support individuals in that relationship in what they individually want and don’t want. Monogamous people in poly relationships suffer. Polygamous people in mono relationships suffer. Etc.
Also that it’s important for a community to support individuals in their relationship choices (which includes the choice to get out of a relationship).
All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction—using fiction to convey serious ideas—are organizations/movements I have negative views of. One thinks of Ayn Rand, those people who take Gor seriously (assuming they’re not just an internet joke), the Pilgrim’s Progress. Trying to cast my net wider, I felt the part of The Republic where Plato tells a story about a city to be weak, I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism. Monopoly is an entertaining board game (well, not a very entertaining one to be honest) but I don’t think it teaches us anything about capitalism.
I’ve been highly frustrated by the use of “parables” here like the dragon of death or the capricious king of poverty; it seems like the writers use them as a rhetorical trick, allowing them to pretend they’ve made a point that they haven’t in fact made, simply because it’s true in their story.
I am genuinely struggling to think of any positive-for-the-political-side examples of this kind of fiction.
I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked (beyond limited polygyny in patriarchal societies, which evidently does “work” on some level) I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don’t (maybe I’m not looking hard enough). Being single clearly works for many people. Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren’t allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work. Widespread interracial marriage simply wasn’t possible before the development of modern transport technology, so there’s no mystery about the lack of historical successes. Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing… hmm, that’s actually a good answer. I shall reconsider.
So, when marriage traditionalists argue that the absence of an established tradition of same-sex marriages is evidence that same-sex marriage isn’t likely to work (since if it did, they’d expect to see an established tradition of same-sex marriage), you don’t find that convincing… your position there is that:
a) marriage is just a special case of long-term, stable relationship, and
b) we do observe an established (if unofficial, and often actively derided) tradition of long-term, stable same-sex relationships among the small fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships, so
c) we should expect same-sex marriages to work among that fraction of the population.
Yes?
But by contrast, on your account we don’t observe an established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships, so a similar argument does not suffice to justify expecting multi-adult marriages to work among the fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships.
Yes? Have I understood you correctly?
You’ve accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don’t yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don’t see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple’s suitability to adopt).
I think we may need to taboo “work” here; if we’re talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that’s a higher standard than just enjoying one’s own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society—Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I’m British/Irish).
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional.
Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it’s not clear to me that there’s ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein’s idea of line marriages working out.
Clearly functional… but as functional? http://www.gwern.net/docs/2012-heinrich.pdf
I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average.
A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.
Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven’t investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.
Where I’m going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do.
My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so.
EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren’t just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren’t making “major contributions to wider society” just as some gay people were. But I don’t have examples to point out.
Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.
Off the top of my head, Erwin Schrödinger.
Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.
I detect a horrible gap in the fabric of the universe! We need to create some ASAP!!
SMBC is on to it.
Right. As I’ve said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.
Sure, absolutely.
Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn’t definitive… maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions… sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs.
I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.
Just to pick a somewhat arbitrary example I was thinking about recently… have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?
Does it qualify as what you’re calling “political fiction”?
Do you associate it with any particular organizations/movements?
By happy coincidence I also read it recently. I’ve not seen it used to make political/philosophical arguments, so I don’t class it as such. To my mind the ending and indeed the whole story is more ambiguous than the examples I’ve been thinking of; if the intent was to push a particular view then it failed, at least in my case. (By contrast Brave New World probably did influence my view of utilitarianism, despite my best efforts to remain unmoved).
If I saw someone using it to argue for a position I’d probably think less of it or them, and on a purely aesthetic level I found it disappointing.
I guess maybe Permutation City is a positive example; it provides a useful explicit example of some things we want to make philosophical arguments about. Maybe because I felt it wasn’t making a value judgement—it was more like, well, scientific fiction.
Thinking about this some more, and rereading this thread, I’m realizing I’m more confused than I’d thought I was.
Initially, when you introduced the term “political fiction,” you glossed it as “using fiction to convey serious ideas.” Which is similar enough to what I had in mind that I was happy to use that phrase.
But then you say that you don’t class Omelas in this category, because it doesn’t successfully push a particular view. Which suggests that the category you have in mind isn’t just about conveying ideas, but rather about pushing a particular philosophical/political perspective—yes?
But then you say that you do class Permutation City in this category (and I would agree), and you approve of it. This actually surprises me… I would have thought, given what you’d said earlier, that you would object to PC on the grounds that it simply asserts a fictional universe in which various things are true, and could be misused as evidence that those things are in fact true in the real world. I’m glad you aren’t making that argument, as it suggests our views are actually closer than I’d originally thought (I would agree that it’s possible to misuse PC that way, as it is possible to misuse other fictional ideas, but that’s a separate issue).
And you further explain that PC isn’t making a value judgment… but that you still consider it an example of political fiction… which is consistent with your original definition of the term… but I don’t know how to reconcile it with your description of Omelas.
So… I’m genuinely confused.
I’m trying to explore this as we go along; it’s very possible I’ve been incoherent.
I don’t class Omelas in any of these categories category because I’ve never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all.
Permutation City was an example I only thought of in the last post. Fundamentally I feel like it belongs in a different cluster from these other examples (including the LW ones) - I’m trying to understand why, and I was suggesting that the value judgements might be the difference, but that’s little more than a guess.
Well… OK. Let’s change that.
OK… now that you’ve seen Omelas used to in a discussion about utilitarian moral philosophy, does your judgment about the story change?
Hmm. I was not fond of the story in any case, so this use would need to be particularly bad to diminish my opinion of it.
The fundamental lack of realism in the story now seems more important. Where before I was happy to suspend disbelief on the implausibility of a town that worked that way, if we’re going to apply actual philosophy it I find myself wanting a more rigorous explanation of how things work—why do people believe that comforting the child would damage the city?
Do I think using the story has made the discussion worse? Maybe; it’s hard to compare to a control in the specific instance. But I think in the general, average case philosophical discussions that use fictional examples turn out less well than those that don’t.
If I thought the use of the story had damaged the discussion, would that make me think less of the story or author? I think my somewhat weaselly (and nonutilitarian) answer is that intent matters here. If I discovered that a story I liked was actually intended allegorically, I think I’d think less of it (and to a certain extent this happened with Animal Farm, which I read naively at an early age and less naively a few years later, and thought less of it the second time). But if someone just happens to use a story I like in a philosophical argument, without there being anything inherent to the story or author that invited this kind of use, I don’t think that would change my opinion.
OK, fair enough. Thanks for clarifying your position.
Interesting.
From my perspective, Omelas does a fine job of doing what I’m claiming fiction is useful for in these sorts of discussions… it makes it easy to refer to a scenario that illustrates a point that would otherwise be far more complicated to even define.
For example, I can, in a conversation about total-utilitarianism, say “Well, so what if anything is wrong with Omelas?” to you, and you can tell me whether you think there’s anything wrong with Omelas and if so what, and we’ve communicated a lot more efficiently than if we hadn’t both read the story.
Similarly, around LW I can refer to something as an Invisible Dragon in the Garage and that clarifies what might otherwise be a hopelessly muddled conversation.
Now, you’re certainly right that while having identified a position is a necessary first step to defending that position, those are two different thigns, and that soemtimes people use fiction to do the former and then act as though they’d done the latter when they haven’t.
This is a mistake.
(Also, since you bring it up, I consider Brave New World far too complicated a story to serve very well in this role… there’s too much going on. Which is a good thing for fiction, and I endorse it utterly, since the primary function of fiction for me is not to provide useful shortcuts in discussions. However, some fiction performs this function and I think that’s a fine thing too.)
I think there is a good deal to be said for the interpretation according to which many of the features of the “ideal” city Socrates describes in Republic are intended to work on the biases of Glaucon and Adeimantus (and those like them) and not intended to actually represent an ideal city. Admittedly, Laws does seem to be intended to describe how Plato thinks a city should be run, so it seems that Plato had some pretty terrible political ideas (at least at the end; Laws is his last work, and I prefer to think his mind was starting to go), but nonetheless it’s not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato.
I completely agree that Brave New World seems unhelpful in evaluating utilitarianism.
Which is I think the fundamental problem with this kind of political fiction. It allows people to present ideas and implications without committing to them or providing evidence (or alternately, making it clear that this is an opposing view that they are not endorsing). But then at a later stage they go on to treat the things that happened in their fiction as things they’d proven.
Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism: the Fordian society’s willingness to treat people as specialized components may not be as immediately terrifying as 1984, but it’s still intentionally disutopian. My apologies if I’m misreading your statement, but many folk don’t get that from reading the book in a classroom environment.
Some subcultures have different expectations of exclusivity, which may be meaningful here even if not true polyamory.
Communication availability and different economic situations, as well. The mainstream entrance of women into the work force as self-sustaining individuals is a fairly new thing, and the availability of instant always-on communication even more recent.
EDIT: I agree that there are structural concerns if a sufficient portion of the leadership are both poly and in a connected relationship, but this has to do more with network effects than polyamory. The availability and expenditures of money are likely to trigger the same network effect issues regardless of poly stuff.
Yes. I thought it would be clear that I knew that, since I don’t think my statement makes any sense otherwise?
I found Brave New World, in so far as it is taken as an illustration of a philosophical point, actively unhelpful; that is, its existence is detrimental to the quality of philosophical discussions about the merits of utilitarianism (basically for all the usual reasons that fictional evidence is bad; it leads people to assume that a utilitarian society would behave in a certain way, or that certain behaviors would have certain outcomes, simply because that was what happened in Brave New World).
(Independently, I found it interesting and enjoyable as a work of fiction).
I think this fine if the papers are good. It’s routine in academic research that somebody says “I’m working on curing cancer.” And then it turns out that they’re really studying one little gene that’s related to some set of cancers. In general, it’s utterly normal in the academy that somebody announces dramatic goal A, and then really works on subproblem D that might ultimately help achieve C, and then B, an important special case of A.
The standard I would use is “are there a significant number of people who find the papers interesting and useful?” And that’s a standard that I think MIRI is improving significantly on. A large fraction of academics with tenure in top-50 computer science departments aren’t work that’s better.
Notice that I wouldn’t use “avoid UFAI danger” as a metric. If the MIRI people are motivated to answer interesting questions about decision theory and coordination between agents-who-can-read-source-code, I think they’re doing worthwhile work.
Worthwhile? Maybe. But it seems dishonest to collect donations that are purportedly for avoiding UFAI danger if they don’t actually result in avoiding UFAI danger.
Which one was it?