My model of what causes maybe most of the drama in the Berkeley rationality community is that it is a professional network superimposed upon a social graph, without much/any explicit optimisation for separating the conflicts that such things would arise. Friendships and romantic relationships optimise for certain things, professional relationships optimise for others, and status is often a fairly simple collapsing of those metrics into one dimension, which means that professional and personal status interact a lot. It’s like if people at your company are only able to date other people who worked at your own company.
Poly just massively increases the number of internal relationships that are subject to this effect (assume # of internal relationships is directly proportional to drama). I don’t expect poly to be nearly as problematic in communities that don’t have this property. There are still arguments against being poly, but I expect your “I empirically observe massive drama” to not be a strong reason elsewhere.
My model of what causes maybe most of the drama in the Berkeley rationality community is that it is a professional network superimposed upon a social graph, without much/any explicit optimisation for separating the conflicts that such things would arise. Friendships and romantic relationships optimise for certain things, professional relationships optimise for others, and status is often a fairly simple collapsing of those metrics into one dimension, which means that professional and personal status interact a lot. It’s like if people at your company are only able to date other people who worked at your own company.
Poly just massively increases the number of internal relationships that are subject to this effect (assume # of internal relationships is directly proportional to drama). I don’t expect poly to be nearly as problematic in communities that don’t have this property. There are still arguments against being poly, but I expect your “I empirically observe massive drama” to not be a strong reason elsewhere.
Note also that this effect increases the incentives to be poly, as more interconnected personal relationships give you more professional power.