Some of my relationships are monogamous. The main advantage to them is that they take less time and effort. They can also reduce drama
Unfortunately monogamy involves creating an artificial monopoly on physical and emotional intimacy. The problems with monopolies that you learn in economics class apply to relationships too and constitute or cause a lot of the ‘drama’ of relationships. The Nash equilibrium in games modelling monopolies are very different from those without a monopoly and human instincts often reflect that difference depending on context.
Since that fateful day, I’ve been involved in both polyamorous and monogamous relationships, and I’ve become quite confident that I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous. This holds even when I’m dating only one person; polyamorous relationships have a kind of freedom to them that is impossible to obtain any other way, as well as a set of similarly unique responsibilities.
This is counter-intuitive but I find it reasonably accurate. On a related note studies show that women orgasm more often and more powerfully when their partner has been with an other woman even if they are not consciously aware of this fact.
studies show that women orgasm more often and more powerfully when their partner has been with an other woman even if they are not consciously aware of this fact.
How in the world do you ethically perform a study that shows this?
Err… Oops. I just went to google to try to find the relevant references. Let’s just say that anything you can find on that topic on google would constitute “generalising from fictional evidence”.
Take a group of women who are not in monogamous relationships and who are having sex with men who have other partners. Randomly assign half to group A and half to group B. Take one partner for each woman. Instruct the partners of the women in group A to not have sex with any other women for two weeks, and instruct the partners of the women in group B to have sex with their other partners frequently for two weeks. Ask the women to self-report how pleasurable they find the sex, and how often and powerfully they orgasm. Tell everyone participating in the study about this procedure, and get their consent to it.
I think my observation is consistent given that it covers past relationships, expected future relationships based on existing principles and whatever my current relationship status is as part of my overall time line. I wouldn’t want to say “some of my relationships have been monogamous” even if it is a more simple and precise historical claim because it comes with potential implications regarding current principles and present relationship status which I do not wish to make.
The problems with monopolies that you learn in economics class apply to relationships too and constitute or cause a lot of the ‘drama’ of relationships.
This sounds plausible, though no immediate examples of this leap to mind. Can you give some example?
The very fact that ‘sent to the doghouse’ exists as a cliché is the most obvious illustration. I’ll add that this kind of thing is often bad for both parties. Our instincts aren’t there to make us happy, they are there to gain power, resources and reproductive advantage. Using sex and emotional intimacy to gain power is a common failure mode in relationships and can make both people miserable to a lesser or greater degree but it does work.
(This fact is completely bizarre to me. If anyone tries to punish me to gain control or coerce me in any way they instantly lose any influence they had over me based on goodwill and I automatically feel free to use any or every means available to get what I want. That is, they have absolutely no ethical rights until such time as they are not coercing me. But I learned in primary school that other people are often quite willing to be controlled by punishment.)
More like a self-esteem thing. Nearly everyone whom I have ever known and respected (and, as far as I know, everyone whom these people know and respect) reacts in that way, and that group includes a lot of people who are as far from aspies as possible.
People who were sincerely friendly and submissive towards their abusers got called many disrespectful names, depending on the context: sluts, boot-lickers, whipped boys, pet doggies, etc.
Do you use asp to refer to Aspergers’ ?(I sometimes see ‘aspie’ but haven’t encountered asp).
It is certainly in there among the big cluster of correlated traits and labels that includes Aspergers’ syndrome and often ADHD. I don’t necessarily qualify for an Aspie label although I quite probably would if I had less IQ. I do know that i would never attempt to coerce any of my friends, lovers or enemies that I identify as having Aspergers’. I wouldn’t expect it to give good results.
Mind you I don’t coerce ‘typical’ others as much as is optimal either. The work of the mind projection fallacy. I have to remind myself that others are ‘spineless pushovers’ (my perspective) or ‘do not have an attitude problem’ (another common perspective).
Oddly enough, the archetypal serpent was a well-developed concept before J. K. Rowling was born.
Both involve social incapacity, compensated for with cold analytics. Both are potential sources of powerful knowledge, complicated by disrespect for, or incomprehension of, traditional limits on the safe use of such knowledge. Both have an unnervingly primordial feel.
For monogamous relationships, the cost of having an additional partner is much higher: you have to forgo your current relationship, and possibly experience drama and a period of being partnerless. Polyamorous relationships mitigate the cost of having an additional partner.
As a result, a monogamist knows that his or her partner is limited to them for the time being, because the costs of ending a monogamous relationship can be so heavy. A monogamous partner gets a lot of leeway to slack off, take their partner for granted, fail to satisfy their partner, or be a jerk, just as long as this behavior doesn’t create a cost to the other partner that is heavier than the projected costs of a breakup.
Monogamist partners have the ability to partially shut out their competitors. When you know that your partner isn’t able to to sample other potential partners for better matches, you don’t have so much of an incentive to fulfill your partner’s preferences.
Of course, polyamorous partners may also have leeway in how well they satisfy their partners’ preferences, because the partner doesn’t expect to be satisfied in every area by them. Yet the polyamorous person who isn’t satisfying a certain preference of their partner isn’t expecting that their partner stays stuck in that dissatisfaction, because the partner can go elsewhere, at least in principle.
The trick would seem to be trying to get the best of both worlds. In many cases the game (in this case the temptation to slack off and let yourself go) is played unconsciously. Commitment and trust, however, tend to be higher level features. The best lovers are, by hypothesis, able to foster security and trust while at the same time keeping competitive instincts in play. The impulse to satisfy all the partner’s desires before they stray. The spark.
Real world relationships (and real world commericial monopolies, for that matter) would suggest that this isn’t literally true. The literal truth is that you can set a higher price than you could get if you didn’t have a monopoly.
To be more accurate, you can set whatever price you want, and the other person needs to choose between paying the price and ending the monopoly (by violating the monogamy agreement or ending the relationship). But in the real world people are often very reluctant to end long-standing relationships quickly.
There are obviously limitations, humans being what they are and all. From what I can tell people can go to more extreme lengths in real world relationships than real world commercial monopolies. When played well people can be made to give everything they have. It’s seriously pathetic, and painful to watch.
The prupose of monogamus marraige is to ensure male productivity.
In a way monomgamus norm is sexual socialism for men. Almost everyone has a wife, almost everyone has a child. It redistributes sexual power away from women and the top 10% of men and gives it to the remaining 90% of men, forcing us into K selection, slowing the pace of evolution and equalizing outcomes.
In a way monogamous norm is sexual socialism for men.
That’s a good way of putting it—and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don’t show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.
Michel Houellebecq has an interesting paragraph about this issue in his novel Whatever:
It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. [...] In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
That’s a good way of putting it—and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don’t show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.
I have a notion that political ideologies are apt to include ideas which are inconsistent with each other, but got bundled together for historical reasons.
That’s certainly true. However, in such cases, one can typically find people who have a greater inclination towards systematization and consistency, and whose overall positions will have clear origins in a particular ideology, but differ from the orthodox positions of that ideology insofar as they’ll have these inconsistencies straightened out somehow. (This will usually not be accepted favorably by their co-ideologists, of course, and will result in their marginalization.)
To take one example, in the historical development of today’s mainstream ideologies, environmentalism got bundled up with leftism pretty much by sheer historical accident. (If you doubt it, consider that an example of a prominent environmentalist from a century ago was Madison Grant.) Thus, there are important points of friction between environmentalism and various leftist ideas that are highly correlated with it today—and although the inconsistencies are usually passed over in silence or answered with implausible rationalizations, one can find people who have pointed them out and ultimately ditched one or the other. (See e.g. this story for one glaring example.)
The issue of economic vs. sexual inequality, however, is one of those cases where the seeming inconsistency is, to the best of my knowledge, without any significant exceptions. This suggests that rather than being bundled up due to historical accident, these positions both stem from some shared underlying motivation. Robin Hanson has written some preliminary speculations on this question, but I think he has only scratched the surface.
This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves. (As a side note, excluding love from any discussion of monogamy and its alternatives is already a substantial deviation from reality; a cursory mention is not sufficient.)
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.
I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.
Modern society is generally opposed to rape. This should not be a striking or insightful conclusion.
Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.
This is just a failure of imagination! There are all sorts of ways a government could redistribute sex, should it so choose:
Economic incentives: pay or give tax breaks to people who have sex with the sex-poor. (If you’re worried about economic coercion, you can limit the payment to those above the poverty level, or create more welfare programs so no one has to depend on sex to meet a certain living condition.) Penalize or charge extra for the sex-rich.
Social and moral incentives: create a publicity campaign through advertisements and mass media to try to change people’s views on sex and attraction.
Leveling out attraction levels: teaching social and flirting skills to the sex-poor and providing them with plastic surgery, personal trainers, or other cosmetic resources. Alternatively, lower everyone to the same level, as in the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron.
Changing men and women’s sex drives and sexual selectivity with neurosurgery, hormonal treatment, or childhood conditioning.
Any or all of these might work, though your last suggestion seems to me to be even worse than wide-scale institutionalized rape. And the Handicapper-General, well, I think that’s the worst of all possible worlds; extinction would be better.
But criticism is easy and having ideas is hard, and I don’t think that you’re taking a bad approach.
Oh, I’m not suggesting that these are good options or that a government should do them: some of them would require a near-totalitarian state to enforce. The easiest and least controversial is probably to teach more social skills and flirting in schools.
But I’m not seeing why the last suggestion is worse than wide-scale institutionalized rape: if we gave young children hormone treatment along with childhood vaccines, and the end result was to balance out levels of sexual selectivity, why is that bad? (I’m not sure this is possible exactly, but there is some evidence that stimulant drugs and changing testosterone levels, for instance, can affect sex drive and selectivity.)
some of them would require a near-totalitarian state to enforce.
On the other hand most governments go to some lengths to prevent your first option from arising naturally by criminalizing prostitution. Society doesn’t merely not engage in redistribution of sex, it actively campaigns against it. It is interesting to consider why this might be.
Deliberately and permanently altering someone else’s mind to achieve your own ends without their informed consent may not necessarily be evil, but I would never want any human being to be able to do such a thing (as we currently are as a species).
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
Note that inequalities in matters of love and sex have quite certainly led to countless murders and suicides both. They have probably not killed as many people as inequalities of material wealth, true, but in absolute terms the death toll is still large.
This is a good point, but I think there’s still a distinction. If you’re broke and starve to death, that isn’t (usually) the result of someone’s deliberate choice. But when love or sex drive someone to doing something terrible, it is still ultimately their decision.
I suppose this distinction is complicated somewhat when you take reductionism into account, but in practice it still seems to be a worthwhile one.
If there’s a decent solution to this problem, by the way, I’m listening. It’s certainly an awful state of affairs.
Just in case I was unclear on this matter, I am not arguing in favor of any particular view on these issues at the present moment—I merely wish to point out that there seems to be a discrepancy here that calls for explanation, and that my hunch is that a correct explanation would open a whole gold mine of insight.
That said, I don’t think your replies to these points are at all satisfactory. In particular:
This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves.
That is all true, however, there is still the undeniable fact that people differ greatly in their attractiveness, that these differences are to a large degree involuntary, and that those blessed with higher attractiveness are offered a great deal of choice and opportunity to achieve these desirable ends in their lives. Whereas those on the bottom are denied virtually any such opportunity, and a large class of not very attractive folks are outcompeted by those in the upper echelons and are thus left with only meager choice and opportunity.
Therefore, even considering all the differences relative to inequalities in material wealth, I don’t think a serious case could be made that harsh inequalities don’t exist in this regard too.
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
However, tremendous amounts of concern about inequalities in material wealth are voiced even in rich societies where even the very poorest people haven’t been in danger of starvation for several generations. It is clear that those concerned about material inequality in modern developed countries object to it as something that is unjust as a matter of principle, or perhaps because they fear that it might cause social instability. (But even in the latter case, surely it not outright absurd to ask similar questions about the possible social consequences of vast inequalities on the sexual market?)
Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.
Nobody was mentioning any such idea. What was mentioned was merely the plausible-sounding hypothesis that in a society with strong monogamous norms, outcomes will be more egalitarian in comparison with a society of sexual laissez-faire, where the immense differences in people’s attractiveness give them vastly unequal opportunities, and those less attractive arguably get a worse deal than under stronger monogamous norms.
Moreover, for an even more extreme test of our intuitions, we can also take an even broader cross-cultural view of things and observe cultures that practice arranged marriage. I have no close familiarity with any such societies, so fairly speaking, I can only suspend judgment, but I certainly don’t see any reason to condemn them harshly outright. (David Friedman relates an interesting anecdote here—I definitely recommend it as an interesting debiasing story.)
As regards Friedman’s anecdote, I have no (ethical) objection to arranged marriage, provided both of the people involved are freely choosing to enter into it and are old enough to understand the consequences of doing so. But this is often not the case with arranged marriages, and so I do object to those specific instances, of which there are many. Happiness is important, but so is choice, even when that choice is to deliberately relinquish some other choice.
Therefore, even considering all the differences relative to inequalities in material wealth, I don’t think a serious case could be made that harsh inequalities don’t exist in this regard too.
Of course harsh inequalities exist, and I have not claimed otherwise. Some people have much more sexual and romantic success than others, and this does seem quite unjust. But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it’s because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.
Whether or not monogamous societies are more egalitarian than sexually laissez-faire ones, coercing one into the other would require a reduction of basic freedoms that I find unacceptable.
Furthermore, I think that the idea of “sexual laissez-faire” that you are discussing here is something of a non-sequitur. No one has suggested that we adopt anything of the sort as a cultural norm; I should note that polyamorous standards include levels of honesty, communication, and egalitarianism that are not at all compatible with any kind of “free market.” You also seem to be operating under the assumption (and I apologize if I’m reading too much into your comments) that such a free market would necessarily involve successful (or possibly “high-status”) men attracting the vast majority of the pool of available women, leaving few options for less successful/attractive men, which ignores the ability of women to form multiple attachments themselves, as well as relationships in which all partners have multiple attachments, which more closely resembles the polyamorous ideal.
But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it’s because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.
Whether or not monogamous societies are more egalitarian than sexually laissez-faire ones, coercing one into the other would require a reduction of basic freedoms that I find unacceptable.
What about reductions of freedom that don’t stem from any legal compulsion or violent threats, but merely from social norms enforced via status and reputation (and, obviously, their consequences on people’s future willingness to maintain and establish various sorts of private relations with you)? Do you believe that these are also unacceptable?
If the answer is yes, then you must perceive any realistic human society, including the one you live in, as a hell of intolerable suffocating constraints. (Honestly, I would lie if I said that I don’t feel a certain sympathy with this perspective—but people are often biased in that they make a big deal only out of certain constraints that bother them, while completely overlooking other even more severe ones that they’re OK with.)
You also seem to be operating under the assumption (and I apologize if I’m reading too much into your comments) that such a free market would necessarily involve successful (or possibly “high-status”) men attracting the vast majority of the pool of available women, leaving few options for less successful/attractive men,
That assumption is, in my opinion, indeed correct, and consistent with what we observe in reality. But I don’t see why you think that I was talking exclusively about men. Less attractive women also get a bad deal in a society where attractiveness is an important status marker, which I see as inevitable under sexual laissez-faire. Moreover, those women who would like to form permanent monogamous relationships, especially if they’re less than stunningly attractive, are faced with much worse prospects in a situation where any man they attach themselves to could be at any moment tempted to defect and try his luck playing the field a bit more before settling down. (Again, note that I’m not contrasting this with a situation where the man would be somehow coerced into attachment, but with a different state of social norms where this would simply be a less attractive option.)
Now, you write:
which ignores the ability of women to form multiple attachments themselves, as well as relationships in which all partners have multiple attachments, which more closely resembles the polyamorous ideal.
But this seems to me like fallacious reasoning. You apparently assume that if women are to form multiple attachments, there will be more attachment opportunities for all men, not just those in the upper tiers of attractiveness. Yet in reality, we see some contrary evidence, in that when women become more promiscuous, the additional amount of sex taking place is not at all distributed randomly or equally across all categories of men; instead, those in the upper tiers of attractiveness get the overwhelming part of it. (I know that this is not equivalent to what you have in mind, but I do think that there is enough similarity to provide at least some relevant evidence.)
Furthermore, I think that the idea of “sexual laissez-faire” that you are discussing here is something of a non-sequitur. No one has suggested that we adopt anything of the sort as a cultural norm; I should note that polyamorous standards include levels of honesty, communication, and egalitarianism that are not at all compatible with any kind of “free market.”
You seem to imply that under your most favorable social arrangements, there would be some constraints relative to a complete sexual laissez-faire (even one with the usual caveats about consenting adults etc.). But how would these be enforced? Or do you believe that people would spontaneously follow them under some favorable circumstances?
You apparently assume that if women are to form multiple attachments, there will be more attachment opportunities for all men, not just those in the upper tiers of attractiveness. Yet in reality, we see some contrary evidence, in that when women become more promiscuous, the additional amount of sex taking place is not at all distributed randomly or equally across all categories of men; instead, those in the upper tiers of attractiveness get the overwhelming part of it. (I know that this is not equivalent to what you have in mind, but I do think that there is enough similarity to provide at least some relevant evidence.)
This does seem to be the case. F. Roger Devlin makes a rather bold statement of this argument in this essay (though I dislike his conservative political slant and certain biased terms; also, ignore his criticism of feminist discourse on sexual violence, because it is massively lower quality that everything else he writes and riddled with errors):
Once monogamy is abolished, no restriction is placed on a woman’s choices. Hence, all women choose the same few men. If Casanova had 132 lovers it is because 132 different women chose him. Such men acquire harems, not because they are predators, but because they happen to be attractive. The problem is not so much male immorality as simple arithmetic; it is obviously impossible for every woman to have exclusive possession of the most attractive man. If women want to mate simply as their natural drives impel them, they must, rationally speaking, be willing to share their mate with others.
But, of course, women’s attitude about this situation is not especially rational. They expect their alpha man to “commit.” Woman’s complaining about men’s failure to commit, one suspects, means merely that they are unable to get a highly attractive man to commit to them; rather as if an ordinary man were to propose to Helen of Troy and complain of her refusal by saying “women don’t want to get married.”
F. Roger Devlin makes a rather bold statement of this argument in this essay (though I dislike his conservative political slant and certain biased terms; also, ignore his criticism of feminist discourse on sexual violence, because it is massively lower quality that everything else he writes and riddled with errors):
Yes, I read that essay a while ago. Trouble is, Devlin’s writing is of the sort I find most frustrating: it delivers some excellent insight wrapped up in an awful presentation, both because of Devlin’s own exaggerations and the disreputable publication venue. Unfortunately, not many people will be willing to look past these negative signals and make the effort to understand his very solid main arguments. A better presentation of his thesis could have reached a much broader audience, and made for a much better reference in discussions of this sort.
Yeah, I agree. I’m currently looking for some better references on hypergamy. I already have a bunch of refs on greater female selectivity, but I’m finding mixed results on hypergamy because of so many different operationalizations of status.
Casanova may have had 132 lovers, but most or all of them weren’t long-term relationships. There’s an upper-limit to the number of serious romantic relationships one person can maintain at one time, and it’s certainly less than ten and probably closer to five (the highest I’ve heard of is four). Furthermore, I’ve pointed out elsewhere that historically, harems are not devised by women.
If women and men maintain approximately equal numbers of relationships (which they seem to, in the poly community), then the most attractive partners available to you will be at least as attractive as they would have been if everyone were monogamous. It’s a matter of math.
I think you’re a little too confident of the argument you’ve been making throughout the comments on this post. There are no economically well-developed modern societies with a social norm other than monogamy, and there are some indications that ubiquitous birth control is a game-changer, so historical evidence may not apply. We’re all arguing without large-scale evidence. We can (and should) speculate about what alternative social norms would entail, and we can justify those speculations to lesser or greater degrees. But there is no certainty in this debate.
There are no economically well-developed modern societies with a social norm other than monogamy, and there are some indications that ubiquitous birth control is a game-changer, so historical evidence may not apply. We’re all arguing without large-scale evidence.
That’s not really true. In large parts of many rich contemporary societies, monogamous norms have been weakened to the point where a great many people engage in non-monogamous sexual behaviors. Yes, even among those people, the majority seem to consider stable monogamy as a goal to be achieved at some point in the future, but they nevertheless spend significant parts of their lives engaged in casual serial monogamy and promiscuous sex. (And in some lower class environments, even the pretense of monogamous norms has nearly disappeared.)
There is definitely significant large-scale evidence here about what happens (in at least some cases) when monogamous norms break down in a wealthy society. This evidence points quite unambiguously towards female hypergamy, where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place, and women at all levels of attractiveness strive towards men with higher relative status. You can of course dispute the relevance of this evidence, but you definitely can’t deny its existence.
Some men want to help raise children, including children who aren’t genetically their own. I’m not talking about cuckoldry, but adoption or choosing women who already have children. What proportion of men do you think that is?
I realize you’re talking about sex, not children, but how children are raised is part of the effect of sexual norms.
More generally, what you describe just doesn’t seem like the world I’m living in. Admittedly, the world I’m living in is mostly science fiction fandom, but I just don’t seem to see women turning down almost every man in the search for high status men.
What proportion of men are you seeing as excluded from mating if the default is non-monogamy?
Some men want to help raise children, including children who aren’t genetically their own. I’m not talking about cuckoldry, but adoption or choosing women who already have children. What proportion of men do you think that is?
I would imagine that the proportion of men who prefer to raise children who are not genetically their own is very low. The proportion of men who are willing to raise children that are not their own because circumstances make it difficult or impossible to have their own biological children or because they desire a relationship with a partner who already has children is probably quite a bit higher.
Admittedly, the world I’m living in is mostly science fiction fandom, but I just don’t seem to see women turning down almost every man in the search for high status men.
The stereotype is that the sex ratio in science fiction fandom is heavily skewed in the male direction. Is this stereotype not accurate?
The stereotype is that the sex ratio in science fiction fandom is heavily skewed in the male direction. Is this stereotype not accurate?
Somewhat, though I don’t think the ratio is that extreme. In any case, if there are more men than women, wouldn’t that increase the variation among men (the high status men would be dramatically higher status) so that if competing for high status men is the most important thing, the competition for the superstars would get more intense.
If there are more men than women I would think you would see more selectivity from women and so more instances of women turning down men than vice-versa. Your original comment implied you don’t see lots of men getting turned down which seems surprising with unequal gender ratios.
There are possible explanations but I’d expect to see a pattern of certain men being consistently overlooked while others had consistent success and that this would be even more pronounced than in society as a whole where gender ratios are more equal. If this is not the pattern you observe I’m curious what you do see and what you think the explanation is.
I admit to spending an annoying couple or three hours on a car trip with a woman who couldn’t talk about anything but her assignation with [big name science fiction author], but that’s the only example I’ve got for extreme status chasing.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are more men in fandom who want sex and can’t get it than women. What I’m disagreeing with is the idea that, given sexual freedom, women will mostly go after the highest status men.
More generally, what you describe just doesn’t seem like the world I’m living in.
Mind you, I wasn’t referring to the whole spectrum of male-female relationships that take place nowadays. Lots of folks still live old-fashioned lives centered around monogamous relationships with the goal of marriage, avoiding promiscuity and (as best they can) serial monogamy. Clearly, under a monogamous regime, people typically end up paired with someone who is roughly in the same league, so the above considerations don’t apply.
However, if we talk specifically about promiscuous behaviors, then the above described hypergamous patterns definitely occur. From the perspective of typical men, or for people unfamiliar with the situation, the options enjoyed here by top-tier men really are nothing like the world they’re living in. After all, there are men whose notch counts are in the four-, perhaps even five-digit territory—whereas on the other side of the spectrum, for very large numbers of men, the increase in promiscuity hasn’t expanded their sexual options at all relative to an absolutely prudish regime. It has possibly even lowered them by reducing their monogamous opportunities.
What proportion of men are you seeing as excluded from mating if the default is non-monogamy?
It’s hard to give any definite numbers, and it obviously depends on the concrete arrangements in practice. It also depends on men’s criteria (some men will be reduced to a choice of women who are in a much lower percentile of attractiveness, so they might find all the available choices unacceptable). But in any case, I would say that under a complete breakdown of all monogamous norms, the percentage of men reduced to virtually zero mating opportunities would be in the double digits.
I think that we’re defining norms in slightly different ways. I have been meaning norms to mean “what people should do” and not just “what people do.” I’ve also been stretching monogamy a little to mean the ideal of having only one partner at a time, whether or not that’s in the context of marriage. It’s a fairly common usage, but still easy to be unclear about.
So I would say that serial monogamy is still monogamy, and that promiscuous sex outside the context of any relationship has little to do with relationship styles at all. Your examples point to a failure to enforce monogamous norms while the norms remain unchanged, I would say.
Or perhaps monogamous norms are weakening, and these examples are the result of particular groups not having any strong relationship norms at all; various kinds of polyamory and swinging offer social norms that can be as strong as monogamous ones, but they’re largely unknown.
Again, it’s hard to say. What evidence there is can be plausibly interpreted in quite a few ways, some of which I’m sure neither of us have thought of.
promiscuous sex outside the context of any relationship has little to do with relationship styles at all.
I’m not sure that’s fair. Couldn’t you say that having multiple friends with benefits is a type of ” relationship style,” in a sense?
monogamous norms are weakening, and these examples are the result of particular groups not having any strong relationship norms at all; various kinds of polyamory and swinging offer social norms that can be as strong as monogamous ones
Again, “take some time between serious relationships to have multiple casual partners” can be a relationship norm, one that appears very common.
You may be assigning too much credence to that news report. It’s really just summarizing an argument between two partisan political parties about marriage’s declining popularity among the poor. The only quantitative data cited is the number of UK marriages in 1972 and the number of UK marriages in 2009, which are not really enough to settle the claims made in the article or your parenthetical.
There is definitely significant large-scale evidence …
Which significant large-scale evidence do you have in mind? The lack of citations suggests that you think it’s very obvious, but I can’t think of it. I may well be missing something obvious, but without a cite I don’t know.
You may be assigning too much credence to that news report.
You’re right, this wasn’t a good choice of reference, if anything since the claims were made in an explicitly politicized context. However, whichever statistics you look at, there is no doubt that the decline in monogamous norms in many Western countries (and the Anglosphere nations in particular) has been far more pronounced among the lower classes, and that among significant parts of the underclass, the traditional monogamous norms have weakened to the point of collapse. See e.g. some U.K. data here, or the U.S. data here (which conveniently control for race, so that the trends are strikingly obvious as a class phenomenon).
If you just google for the relevant terms, you’ll get tons of statistics corroborating these basic points from various angles.
Which significant large-scale evidence do you have in mind? The lack of citations suggests that you think it’s very obvious, but I can’t think of it. I may well be missing something obvious, but without a cite I don’t know.
Regarding citations, one problem here is that when it comes to people’s sexual behavior, social science data based on surveys are of dubious value. As a rule, men report having sex with significantly more women on average than vice versa—a logical impossibility assuming the samples are representative. So, either people lie big time about their sexual behavior even in anonymous surveys (which sounds quite plausible to me), or the samples always turn out to be critically unrepresentative. (Here is one attempt at the latter sort of explanation.)
Nevertheless, the existing data suggest pretty convincingly that when it comes to the distribution of the total number of sex partners, men’s distribution has a much wider variance than women’s. See this article (unfortunately not available ungated) for references. This observation is consistent with the scenario where women at all levels of attractiveness strive towards men at higher levels, so that men near the bottom get nothing, while those in the upper tiers are making out like bandits.
However, even regardless of any research data, things should be obvious from common knowledge and everyday observations. There are clearly lots of men around for whom getting into any relationship with a woman would be a Herculean accomplishment, even more of those who struggle with positive but still meager results, and a minority for whom getting laid with attractive women is almost trivial, who easily rack up many dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of notches. (Of course, this is a continuum, not a sharp division.) This is the situation to which the weakening of monogamous norms in recent decades has led, and it surely constitutes evidence of the sort whose existence WrongBot denied in his above comment.
See e.g. some U.K. data here, or the U.S. data here (which conveniently control for race, so that the trends are strikingly obvious as a class phenomenon).
Thanks! I think I misinterpreted your earlier post; when I wrote the grandparent comment, I had read ‘monogamy’ as you referring to faithful long-term one-on-one relationships, not just the subset of those relationships that are marriages. But it sounds like you mean marriage proper, in which case I think you’re right (albeit depending on what scale of ‘environment’ we’re talking about).
However, even regardless of any research data, things should be obvious from common knowledge and everyday observations. There are clearly lots of men around for whom getting into any relationship with a woman would be a Herculean accomplishment, even more of those who struggle with positive but still meager results, and a minority for whom getting laid with attractive women is almost trivial, who easily rack up many dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of notches.
If I’m honest, my own everyday observations and knowledge don’t seem to be strong evidence of all three of: (1) breakdown of monogamous norms, (2) a concurrent increase in female hypergamy ‘where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place’, and (3) a causal relationship between #1 and #2. It doesn’t help that I didn’t even hit adolescence until last decade—I expect I have much less experience of relationship trends over time than you.
It seems plausible to me that men have a much wider variance in heterosexual sex partners than women, but I’m not sure it’s definitively confirmed—or that the variance ratio has increased over the last few decades because of a decline in monogamous norms. The PNAS article suggests that a failure to account for prostitutes in sex surveys can explain the male-female difference in mean number of sexual partners, which hints that it might also explain the male-female difference in variance, too. (After all, excluding female prostitutes from a survey is a little like chopping the right tail off the female sex partner distribution, which would decrease its variance.) The other review article doesn’t seem to suggest a clear trend in the male-female variance ratio over time, either, although it looks like there is (surprisingly—at least to me) little high-quality data for judging that.
For anyone else curious about the published paper, it’s freely available. Annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to say the standard deviation of number of sex partners for women under each condition, only averages, so it’s hard to do an independent statistical check. The authors did do their own test:
Number of sexual partners. The two-way ANOVA on self-reports of the number of sexual partners yielded no significant effects, F < 1, but the data did strongly favor the predicted pattern (see Figure 2). That is, men reported more sexual partners than did women in the exposure threat condition (3.7 vs. 2.6, η² = .03), where gender expectations are most salient. The magnitude of the sex difference decreased in the anonymity condition (4.2 vs. 3.4, η² = .01), and the direction of the difference actually reversed in the bogus pipeline condition, with men reporting fewer partners than women (4.0 vs. 4.4, η² = .001).
The ‘bogus pipeline condition’ is one where the women were hooked up to a (not working) lie detector.
A much smaller one, which may well be within statistical bounds. Good point about people knowing that lie detectors don’t work. That may account for any remaining difference.
Apparently, there was no experiment with the men hooked up to a (bogus) lie detector, and I think there should have been.
Sure there was:
Men who thought they were attached to a polygraph reported an average of 4.0 sexual partners, compared to 3.7 partners for those who thought their answers might be seen.
Thanks—goes to show I should have read the linked material.
I’m surprised. I’d have expected that men would lie about having more partners rather than fewer, but that might be mere stereotyping on my part.
The other possibility I can think of is that people who think they’re hooked to a lie detector don’t just say what they immediately think is true, they check their memories more carefully.
You seem to imply that under your most favorable social arrangements, there would be some constraints relative to a complete sexual laissez-faire (even one with the usual caveats about consenting adults etc.). But how would these be enforced?
What about reductions of freedom that don’t stem from any legal compulsion or violent threats, but merely from social norms enforced via status and reputation (and, obviously, their consequences on people’s future willingness to maintain and establish various sorts of private relations with you)?
One question answers the other. I don’t imagine, by the way, that polyamory will ever be the norm, nor do I think it should. The social arrangement I favor most involves each individual freely choosing whichever option they prefer; I imagine that under such circumstances no one style of relationship would predominate.
I disagree. Polyamory is as has often been said something we do anyway. Just less honestly.
Female hypergamy and male vanity (everyone likes to think of themselves as high value) most likley ensure that this [poliamory] will at least for some time be the dominant arrangement in Western society.
I know the Roissyisphere isn’t very popular here but the spirit of this particular saying of his rings true:
“To the average woman five minutes of alpha is worth five years of beta.”
Polyamory requires honesty, by definition. Ethical non-monogamy is different from non-consensual non-monogamy. This discussion can’t go anywhere if you’re redefining words to mean what you want them to mean. If you want to talk about the category of practices that includes everything but monogamy, use “non-monogamy”. If you want to talk about dishonest non-monogamy, use “non-consensual non-monogamy” or “cheating.”
How do you classify a relationship between >2 people, where the people involved have an agreement not to date other people, and where one of the members does so anyway?
The appropriate label to use is the one that best describes what the people in the relationship have agreed to, implicitly or explicitly. Cheating doesn’t turn a monogamous relationship into something else, it’s just a violation of the relationship’s rules. Ditto with a polyamorous one.
And this does happen, by the way, and when it does, it’s usually really awful. Monogamous cheating is bad enough, but when you’re in a triad (or a quad, or...) you do at least as much damage to several people. More, probably, considering that there’s usually more trust and clear negotiation involved.
A supposedly monogamous relationship where one or both members cheats is non-consensually open and non-consensually non-monogamous. A supposedly closed polyamorous relationship where one or more members cheats is also non-consensually open, but I don’t see how it makes sense to consider it non-polyamorous.
I don’t see how it makes sense to consider it non-polyamorous.
Well, it’s non-monogamous, but it doesn’t meet the ideals of polyamory. I guess it depends on your definition. I think it makes the most sense to consider it an unsuccessful attempt at a polyamorous relationship.
If the answer is yes, then you must perceive any realistic human society, including the one you live in, as a hell of intolerable suffocating constraints. (Honestly, I would lie if I said that I don’t feel a certain sympathy with this perspective—but people are often biased in that they make a big deal only out of certain constraints that bother them, while completely overlooking other even more severe ones that they’re OK with.)
But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it’s because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.
To the extent that sexual and romantic success is related to non-innate qualities, those qualities could be distributed more equally. Based on my experience with the seduction community, many components of sexual and romantic attractiveness are based on behaviors that can be learned, particularly in the case of male sexual attractiveness to women. Currently, these skills are not distributed equitably, leading to vast disparities in social skills related to romantic success that are not required by biologically-based differences in aptitude. Once someone gets set on the wrong “track,” then they end up greatly lacking in procedural knowledge. As I argued here, these disparities are unjust.
I saw that post earlier and I think I largely agree with it. Consider that quoted assertion retracted: education in social skills may be an ethical way to systematically reduce inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity. I’m not without my criticisms of the seduction community, but discovering and documenting processes that allow people to become genuinely more attractive is praiseworthy.
Tangentially, while women seem to be better at acquiring social skills on average, I think most people underestimate how many of them would be interested in a PUA-like program, if it were presented in the right way. (Which is to say, not how the PUA community represents itself to men. Different social norms and all.)
Tangentially, while women seem to be better at acquiring social skills on average, I think most people underestimate how many of them would be interested in a PUA-like program, if it were presented in the right way.
Why? Women already have their PUA act together. They understand very clearly that physical beauty is the key factor in attracting men, and have a huge industry for creating fake physical beauty.
In general, I think it’s a gross mistake for men to think women “have it easier”. I would guesstimate that the typical woman spends a way bigger share of her time and money on being attractive to the opposite sex than the typical man. They’re more aware of the game, they start playing it earlier, they coach each other all the time… no wonder they win! As a male, I was able to increase my attractiveness hugely as soon as I realized this was worth making a serious effort: say, the equivalent of one workday (8 hours) per week in total. From what I’ve seen, most men can’t be bothered to spend even that much, while most women are conditioned to spend more than that.
As a male, I was able to increase my attractiveness hugely as soon as I realized this was worth making a serious effort: say, the equivalent of one workday (8 hours) per week in total. From what I’ve seen, most men can’t be bothered to spend even that much, while most women are conditioned to spend more than that.
For many men their actual work days are to some degree part of a serious effort to be attractive to women. The ‘traditional’ advice to become attractive to women is to develop a good, stable career, achieve a degree of material success and maintain reasonable health, fitness and appearance. The fact that it is not terribly effective advice on its own doesn’t mean that lots of men don’t put a good deal of effort into following it.
Your proposed theory implies a nice testable prediction and a nice policy recommendation: men should make better worker bees on average, and we should pay them more. Haha, oh wait.
The difference between “women” and “most women” is vast. Some men benefit much more from PUA than others, and those men have some characteristics in common. There are women with those characteristics who I suspect would benefit from a PUA-like program in the same way that men do. But perhaps not; I’m not much of an expert on the seduction community.
You’re committing the typical mistake that I will call symmetrism: thinking that men and women have mostly equivalent roles in mating, may benefit from similar advice, etc. This is an easy mistake to make because men aren’t all that different from women in many other areas. But mating is special: it is the whole goddamn reason why we have these concepts of “males” and “females”, so by default you should expect huge differences instead of equality!
From this perspective it’s pretty easy to dissect your comment. PUA is an attempt to honestly formulate what attracts women. If you wanna have the female equivalent of PUA, you need to formulate what attracts men. Honestly, is that hard? Men are attracted to youth and physical beauty. Gee, I wish women had some kind of industry that supplied that to them… Oh wait.
However, you seem to be confusing tactics with strategy. For women, maximizing physical attractiveness will clearly result in an immediate tactical advantage, but it won’t magically make their strategy sound, especially in the long term. And in this regard, there is certainly lots of deluded and clueless behavior by women going on, and good advice is hard to find and drowned in a sea of nonsense.
PUA is an attempt to honestly formulate what attracts women. If you wanna have the female equivalent of PUA, you need to formulate what attracts men. Honestly, is that hard? Men are attracted to youth and physical beauty.
That’s far from all we’re attracted to… there’s also what some folks refer to as “feminine radiance”—the female counterpart of male confidence or presence, though it’s quite different in form. (For example, it involves a lot more smiling.)
I’ve seen women with this quality draw crowds, even if they’re not that young or beautiful-looking (when they’re not smiling).
And I would imagine this is a quality that can be taught, just as men can be taught to have increased confidence and presence.
Yep, I know exactly what you’re talking about because I met several women like that and I try to learn from them whenever I can. In a more fair and just world, this feminine quality would attract men more than “mere” beauty. But it doesn’t. Not even for me; it makes for a pleasant bonus afterward, but it’s not really enough to outweigh bad looks up front.
This state of affairs is quite sad and I’m actually trying to change it, modify myself to like “radiant” girls more than pretty girls, because I feel this is the right thing to do. Both for them and for me.
I’ve seen women with this quality draw crowds, even if they’re not that young or beautiful-looking (when they’re not smiling).
Your parenthetical makes it sound like the effect is transient, perhaps even under control. How sharp is the effect? What do you think of the story about Marilyn Monroe? (original source)
From this perspective it’s pretty easy to dissect your comment. PUA is an attempt to honestly formulate what attracts [most] women. If you wanna have the female equivalent of PUA, you need to formulate what attracts [most] men. Honestly, is that hard? [Most] Men are attracted to youth and physical beauty. Gee, I wish women had some kind of industry that supplied that to them… Oh wait.
One of the reasons that I’m not interested in PUA is that (most of) the community sees trends and thinks they are laws. The women who I imagine could benefit from a PUA-style program are the ones who want to attract men that are interested in more than youth and physical beauty, but don’t know how to present themselves as interesting because most of the dating advice they get completely ignores that factor. I know that these women exist because I am dating one and friends with others.
Generalization can be a useful tool, but not when you’re specifically looking at a subset of the group.
I think that you and cousin it are both right, but using different definitions of the word “attraction.” He seems to be using it to mean specifically sexual attraction, such as arousal. Since male sexual attraction seems primarily related to looks, women indeed have plenty of advice for fulfilling that preference. You seem to be using attraction in a broader sense, to describe not just desirability on a sexual level, but desirability as a partner. For components of partner desirability other than raw sexual attraction (e.g. relationship desirability), women may need just as much help as men, and benefit from approaches similar to PUAs.
For instance, PUAs discourage showing overt insecurity to potential mates. The theory is that insecurity lowers female attraction to males on a sexual level. Now, while insecurity probably doesn’t lower male sexual attraction to women, it probably does lower women’s desirability on a platonic level to many men, so women could still benefit from PUA-style advice for avoiding displays of insecurity (e.g. avoiding “qualifying oneself”).
I’ve dated a couple women who constantly put themselves down, and while it didn’t change my sexual attraction to them one bit, it did lower their desirability as a longer-term partner (so you could say that it lowered my “attraction” to them, in the broader sense of attraction).
A lot of pickup discourse includes advice other than sexual attractiveness, such as:
avoiding insecurity
creating and facilitating connections
frame control (i.e. managing who’s epistemology is running the interaction, and making sure that you are at least an equal partner in the assignment of meanings to things)
telegraphing your expectations and desires about where you want things to go
status (probably not quite so important for women, but acting dramatically lower status than a guy will often lead to not being taken seriously as relationship material)
systematic practice, and being honest about oneself about your results, capabilities, and areas in need of improvement
Since male sexual attraction seems primarily related to looks, women indeed have plenty of advice for fulfilling that preference. You seem to be using attraction in a broader sense, to describe not just desirability on a sexual level, but desirability as a partner. For components of partner desirability other than raw sexual attraction (e.g. relationship desirability), women may need just as much help as men, and benefit from approaches similar to PUAs.
And even for sexual attraction, there are PUA-like approaches that would help women attract men: for instance, knowing how to approach a guy, flirt with him, tease him, and make sexually suggestive comments that make him interested.
Thank you. Those are exactly the sorts of advice I was thinking of, and you’re entirely correct about the broader sense in which I was using “attraction” (though, incidentally, I find that displays of insecurity are a turn-off).
What makes you think a PUA-like program would help the subset of women you’re talking about? Do you think the men they’re interested in are woman-like in some respect, so the same techniques would work on them? I can’t understand your argument, maybe I’m misreading it.
A PUA-like program (i.e., one that focuses on improving social skills) would help the subset of women who are interested in attracting the subset of men who place a high value on social skills.
Do you think the men they’re interested in are woman-like in some respect, so the same techniques would work on them?
Do you believe that there are some traits that are quintessentially female?
The interesting aspects of attraction are the psychological ones. You’re oversimplifying male attraction if you think it’s all about youth and beauty: what makes men attracted to women who aren’t young and beautiful sometimes? What makes a man commit if he has other options of equivalent youth and beauty? Psychological and mental attraction are relevant here as well. Some of the techniques are similar for men as well as women (showing scarcity, for instance, is fairly universal), while others may be different for women.
I don’t have anything to add, I just wanted to jump on the indignation bandwagon.
How dare you say such a thing, you terrorist! Whenever someone says that men don’t already get the assistance toward attraction that women do, I feel like 9/11 happened all over again.
As a male, I was able to increase my attractiveness hugely as soon as I realized this was worth making a serious effort: say, the equivalent of one workday (8 hours) per week in total.
Where are you spending your 8 hours? Are we talking about haircuts, shoes, tans, skin care, and cosmetic muscles—or about verbal and psychological PUA-Game?
They understand very clearly that physical beauty is the key factor in attracting men, and have a huge industry for creating fake physical beauty.
What do you mean by fake? I personally find most forms of female makeup, cosmetic surgery, high heels, etc. unattractive, but I find it difficult to understand how appearance-modification can be fake. Isn’t all appearance an inherently unreliable signal as to core content? I mean, if for some absurd reason I were thinking of marrying someone who I didn’t trust, and I wanted to know if she were (say) in good long-term health, I wouldn’t just check to see if she had nice long hair and clear skin—I would ask to see her medical records and her parents’ medical records.
When a woman does take steps to make her skin appear clearer, I don’t take this as a way of fooling or faking me into thinking that she has an unusually good immune system—I see it as a way of satisfying her superficial urge to look pretty and my superficial urge to date someone who looks pretty. And, basically, I’m OK with that. I don’t see it as fake, because, assuming it’s done right she actually does look prettier. There’s nothing going on here that’s both fake and relevant. Obviously she might look different when she wakes up in the morning than when she goes out clubbing, but it takes an unusually naive person not to quickly figure that sort of thing out and adjust for it.
I mostly spend my time experimenting with body language and face expressions to make a higher percentage of random women feel instant attraction. Think “smiling across the room”. No haircuts or tans, but also almost no verbal game and no “inner game”. YMMV.
You seem to have assumed that I used “fake” as a synonym for “bad” and immediately rushed to defend… uh… something you thought you should defend. I see this reaction often, and it troubles me.
I mostly spend my time experimenting with body language and face expressions to make a higher percentage of random women feel instant attraction. Think “smiling across the room”. No haircuts or tans, but also almost no verbal game and no “inner game”. YMMV.
Could I get more details on how you do this? Are you talking about a Marlon Brando-esque smile/smirk? 8 hours a week just for body language and facial expressions without accompanying conversation seems like a lot. Do you also practice conversation with them? What happens when they do feel attraction?
I tend to mostly focus on conversation, but this is probably something I should work on.
I go to crowded clubs, move around and try to interact with as many people as I can. (Two nights a week is more than 8 hours.) Catch someone’s attention, approach, do what makes sense, repeat. I do end up having many conversations but don’t think of this as “verbal game”, because talking never seems to tip the odds in my favor if they weren’t good to begin with. The first five seconds of nonverbal interaction allow me to predict with exceptional accuracy whether that person will be attracted to me. Maybe I’m doing “verbal game” wrong, though. Or maybe my initial prediction actually has causal power and influences my “verbal game” in subtle ways :-)
You seem to have assumed that I used “fake” as a synonym for “bad”
I hope not! I’m genuinely curious what you mean by fake. Even in a context devoid of moral judgments, “fake” seems like a natural antonym of “natural” or “real,” and both of those words seem unreasonably vague to me for effective communication. The only coherent, tight definition of “fake” that I can imagine right now is “a false signal,” as in, “that rattlesnake’s bright yellow patterning is fake; it’s not really poisonous.” I find that most people don’t mean “false signal” when they say fake, though, so I’m trying to find out what you mean by it. Maybe you know another tight definition and you can teach me about it.
As for being defensive, well, yes, that’s a character flaw of mine. Please let me know if you have any specific advice for overcoming it beyond “be more inclined to assume the best of people,” and I will carefully consider it.
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
While inequalities of love and sex don’t usually kill, I would claim that those inequalities can be significantly harmful. For people who want to have partners, not being able to tends to trash their mental health. Look into involuntary celibacy, and love-shyness. Gilmartin’s work on men with “love-shyness” who experienced significant heterosexual anxiety and impairment found them to be depressed and have violent fantasies. They had suicidal thoughts, but he concluded that they were too depressed to even attempt suicide. His book can be downloaded for free here (despite the caveats on that page, it is a must-read for anyone who finds that these difficulties ring a bell).
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
While this is an important observation, Houellebecq has no political interest in changing the system. He just analyzes romantic and sexual frustration, which is not as bad material inequality, but a very good topic for dramatic fiction.
That was proorly phrased I agree. I should have said monogamus marriage emerged as a semiwidespread norm because societies that had it oucompeted other societies.
Also it may fit the purposes of several historical pseudosocial engineers (founders of religions and city states, rulers, village elders, ect.).
I’ve actually been thinking that polyamory would be closer to sexual socialism in increasing people’s chances of getting a partner. Limiting ourselves exclusively to heterosexual people for a moment, with an uneven amount of men and women, monogamy guarantees that some people will have to remain outside a long-term commitment. In a polyamorous environment, where people can freely choose to form pairs, triads, etc., this is much easier to avoid.
Theoretically, yes. So I don’t know why you are getting down-voted. My initial reaction was to disagree, and that things would only work that way if people’s preferences were uncorrelated, such as from attractiveness being equally distributed among the population. Since that is not the case, the more choice you tend to give people, the more they would gravitate towards the most attractive people of the gender they are attracted to.
Yet there could be another effect in the opposite direction. Under monogamy, you can only be with one person, so you have to make sure you are really into them. Yet under polyamory, it you could get together with people who are lower on your scale of attractiveness without suffering an opportunity cost of forgoing a higher attractiveness partner.
Under non-monogamy, I would speculate that with straight women, the first effect predominates (going for the most attractive people). With straight men, the second effect (being willing to compromise on the attractiveness of partners) may play a stronger role than it does with straight women.
Even if appealing traits are distributed unevenly, the most appealing people will still only have the time for a limited number of relationships at a time. In a monogamous world leads to high-appeal people being paired with high-appeal people and low-appeal people being paired with low-appeal people. I would expect the same phenomenon to mainly persist in a polyamorous world, with the exception that it wouldn’t be just couples anymore and, for the reasons you note, the stratification would probably be somewhat less harsh.
I’m not sure if there is any actual evidence for this conclusion. In a polyamorous world (and considering for simplicity only heterosexual relationships), if women of all levels are strongly inclined towards the upper tiers of men, to the point where they prefer a polyamorous arrangement involving more women than men, but restricted to men of higher appeal, this can lead to far more inequality than any monogamous world. In this scenario, it may happen that men from the lower tiers get shut out of access to women altogether, while those from the top enjoy arrangements involving many women and few men, or even exclusive polygynous arrangements. Among women, too, there would be a severe stratification with regards to how favorable arrangements are realistically available to them depending on their attractiveness.
Considering the evidence from quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread nowadays, i.e. serial monogamy and promiscuity, this scenario doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me. Of course, these behaviors are not identical to what would happen in a hypothetical polyamorous society, but they still provide significant information about the revealed preferences of both men and women.
Personally, I’ve seen more examples of polyamorous arrangements involving more men than women than the opposite. Of course, this might be just sampling bias, and obviously it would hardly be any better if men were the ones who got shafted.
I’m pretty sure there is a decisive sampling bias there, since men in the top tiers of attractiveness are, in all likelihood, severely underrepresented among those practicing explicit “card-carrying” polyamory. Therefore, it seems to me that the patterns of quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread in the general population provide a much better indication as to what would happen if polyamory became the general norm—and these point pretty clearly towards the scenario I described above.
men in the top tiers of attractiveness are, in all likelihood, severely underrepresented among those practicing explicit “card-carrying” polyamory.
Why?
I know several incredibly attractive men in the poly community; my sample is small enough that I can’t say such men are over-represented in the poly community, but I would be very surprised if your assumption were correct.
I would guess that Vladimir_M is using attractiveness in a broader sense than merely physical. Since power, wealth and status are important components of attractiveness for most women when judging men and since being openly polyamorous would be somewhat problematic for men in many traditionally high status positions it is likely that they will be underrepresented. They are also likely to be overrepresented in non-open / non-consensual non-monogamy.
I was likewise using attractiveness in that broader sense. I can’t speak to wealth, but the poly subculture contains men with plenty of power and status within the poly subculture. Status only has meaning within a particular social context; evaluating a poly man’s status in the context of the greater monogamous culture is no more meaningful than evaluating a monogamous man’s status in the poly subculture. It’s apples and oranges.
I’m not sure of Vladimir’s reasoning, but I might speculate that men at the top tiers of attractiveness don’t even need to join the poly community to have multiple partners.
Furthermore, being poly may have certain correlates (e.g. geekiness) that are only attractive to subsets of the female population (e.g. the subset that is poly).
I’m not sure of Vladimir’s reasoning, but I might speculate that men at the top tiers of attractiveness don’t even need to join the poly community to have multiple partners.
Furthermore, being poly may have certain correlates (e.g. geekiness) that are only attractive to subsets of the female population (e.g. the subset that is poly).
Yes, that’s pretty much what I had in mind. For a man of very high attractiveness, becoming a card-carrying polyamorist is a deal that brings no real benefit for the cost. Such men already have a rich array of options in which they’ll have the upper hand, including polygynous arrangements.
men at the top tiers of attractiveness don’t even need to join the poly community to have multiple partners.
As I understand it, polyamory is having multiple committed relationships, not just multiple partners. I don’t think having multiple partners is limited to only the “top tiers of attractiveness” for men; I think it’s fairly common.
I doubt anyone joins the poly community just to have multiple partners; it seems like way too much work building relationships for that, when you could just find friends with benefits. Someone who just wanted multiple partners would likely not bother; however, people who have been in successful poly relationships likely have a lot of experience and practice in dealing with sex and emotions and managing relationships, which would increase their attractiveness.
Downvoted for “suckers” being unnecessarily aggressive and implying that anyone who doesn’t share a particular taste in relationships is doing it wrong.
Downvoted for “suckers” being unnecessarily aggressive and implying that anyone who doesn’t share a particular taste in relationships is doing it wrong.
I acknowledge your right to have an opinion and have downvoted it for being an influence contrary to my preferences and also for making a false accusation (which I shall expand on since it is a nearly universally made error that is essentially built in to human reasoning).
implying that anyone who doesn’t share a particular taste in relationships is doing it wrong.
No. There is a difference between preferences and decisions. In economics the preferences of agents are often more or less defined by what they actually choose. Yet this is only the case in practice when the agent is super intelligent and Coherently Extrapolates (or otherwise has coherent) Volition. Preference is subjective but the preference of an agent is also an objective fact about the stat of the universe. People can be wrong about what they prefer and (as I said) definitely make decisions that do not benefit them. Sexual behaviors are among the most readily influenced of human decisions and also the most frequent case in which people’s decisions do not really benefit them.
I do make the particular presumptive normative implication that you accuse me of, I do make other implicit normative claims that can be the valid subject of your disapproval.
“Suckers” is a normatively loaded expression, one generally interpreted to be condescending. (Dictionary.com: “sucker: Informal: a person easily cheated, deceived, or imposed upon.”) I’m aware of the difference between preferences and decisions, and I wouldn’t have downvoted you if you didn’t have that word there.
I’m not saying that you necessarily intended your comment to sound condescending and aggressive, but that’s how it comes off as.
“Suckers” is a normatively loaded expression, one generally interpreted to be condescending. (Dictionary.com: “sucker: Informal: a person easily cheated, deceived, or imposed upon.”)
This is not remotely in question and quoting from the dictionary for the word ‘sucker’ is condescending and bizarre. I went out of my way to make it clear that my argument is that you were condemning the wrong thing, an objective thing that is other than the normative claim present. You criticize not something for which I merely have a different opinion, it is something that is not subject to opinion at all.
I’m aware of the difference between preferences and decisions
This may be the case but your comments do not apply such awareness to the context.
I’m not saying that you necessarily intended your comment to sound condescending and aggressive, but that’s how it comes off as.
Neither condescension nor aggressiveness are things that I would try to deny. For the issue of human vulnerability to detrimental sexual influence I actually consider them a right and appropriate response. That position of mine is one with which it is possible to disagree and condemn (even though such behavior should be discouraged). But saying things that don’t make sense while condescending, well, that is one of the unforgivable curses.
This is not remotely in question and quoting from the dictionary for the word ‘sucker’ is condescending and bizarre.
My apologies, then. No condescension was intended, but this community is known to have both a large number of people on the autistic spectrum as well as non-native speakers of English. I have personally used offensive language without realizing it to be that, in the past (though not on this site, I hope).
I think I got what you’re saying now, but just to be sure. When you said:
I do make the particular presumptive normative implication that you accuse me of, I do make other implicit normative claims that can be the valid subject of your disapproval.
did you mean to say that you were not expressing disapproval to people having a preference for situations with more women than men, but rather expressing disapproval to people thinking they had this preference?
this community is known to have both a large number of people on the autistic spectrum as well as non-native speakers of English. I have personally used offensive language without realizing it to be that, in the past (though not on this site, I hope).
On a note almost certainly not divorced from the topic of the autistic spectrum it is amusing to note that I don’t object all that much to being accused of acts of aggressive condescension but that when I get accused of something in a way that isn’t the right accusation it resolves in my evaluation as outright evil.
did you mean to say that you were not expressing disapproval to people having a preference for situations with more women than men, but rather expressing disapproval to people thinking they had this preference?
Closer, and that is something that my words could legitimately be taken to imply. More precisely I would say that I object to “the act of succumbing to influences that lead one away from one’s preferred outcomes in a manner that should be obvious due to maladaptive emotional insecurities.” That happens to be a flaw in human psychology, a maladaptive left-over from a different environment, that has particularly negative consequences, is often exploited at a cultural level and that I have a personal vendetta against.
Very well. In that case, I continue to express my disapproval for a variety of reasons, including:
If someone really does succumb to influences that lead away from their preferred outcomes due to emotional insecurities, then acting derisive is likely to only make them defensive and less likely to actually change their behavior.
In general, I think we should seek to foster a positive atmosphere on LW. It makes the site more pleasant to read, and avoids the risk of misunderstandings (like mine above) that arise from provocative language.
Even though your hypothesis of “this is emotionally suboptimal behavior for a large fraction of people” does sound plausible, there’s still a considerable chance that you might be wrong. It seems to me that a good heuristic is “be very careful about the kinds of thinking you’re loading with negative affect, or people might become unwilling to properly update in favor of that thinking afterwards”.
This is especially so since regardless of whether or not that’s right for the majority, there are almost certainly bound to be people for whom that kind of behavior is in fact the emotionally optimal one. Loading negative affect on that behavior can cause them lasting emotional harm.
Expressing things in strong and confrontational tones will also make it socially harder for you yourself to update in a different direction afterwards (if that turns out to be necessary), so that sort of behavior should be discouraged.
More precisely I would say that I object to the act of succumbing to influences that lead one away from preferred outcomes in an obvious way due to maladaptive emotional insecurities. That happens to be a flaw in human psychology, a maladaptive left-over from a different environment that has particularly negative consequences, is often exploited at a cultural level and that I have a personal vendetta against.
I agree with you on that, but I don’t see why you think that’s what’s going on with consensual polyamorous relationships.
I agree with you on that, but I don’t see why you think that’s what’s going on with consensual polyamorous relationships.
That isn’t something I have said.
Anyway, I just noticed the great grandparent is standing at −2. I would accept that as par for the course for a clearly provocative ‘suckers’ call but −2 for the linked comment in the given context is a violation of my criteria for good faith participation. Since I don’t actually have an agenda to pursue here there given the freedom from self imposed ethical limitations my usual policy is to just ignore the conversation.
I upvoted it, just so you could respond. I’m curious what you did mean then. I thought you said something like that men in polyamorous relationships where men outnumbered women were not making the best decision, that it was a “detrimental sexual influence,” and that they were “succumbing to influences that lead one away from preferred outcomes in an obvious way due to maladaptive emotional insecurities.” Would you please explain why you think that? It doesn’t make sense to me, because such a relationship would be likely to give them supportive friends and partners, and allow them the freedom to find other partners as well.
Your question is reasonable but I if I replied in full it would change my previous stance to a coercion attempt rather than ejection according to my principles!
More practically, I think getting a shared understanding here would involve extensive comparing and contrasting of our underlying models of human behavior. Since claims about how humans think and act can sometimes be sensitive I thought we’d be better off if I left my meaning ‘lost in translation’. :)
That depends on the opportunity cost. Are you spending a lot of resources on this 1⁄3 of a partner, and can you reallocate them to get a better deal elsewhere? For example, if the girl doesn’t demand anything and just comes over sometimes to have sex, I don’t care if she spends other nights with other guys. But if she gives me drama or drains my money, I’ll do the calculation and tell her to gtfo.
Reading this comment has suddenly clarified the nature of our disagreements. We have completely incompatible priorities when it comes to dating, I think, and so any disagreement we might have can probably be chased back to those priorities, independent of particular pieces of evidence or reasoning.
I would also like to know more details about the nature and origin of your disagreement. However, Cousin It’s comment doesn’t seem too far off of what you said elsewhere (“Don’t stick your dick in crazy”). I would bet you would also drop a relationship where it seemed like you were always giving, and things didn’t seem fair and balanced.
Yes, that sounds about right. If you can win the dating game on your own terms, more power to you :-) It would be interesting to trace the origins of our incompatible priorities though. Everything is a consequence of something, right?
This question doesn’t make sense to me: if you are in a polyamorous relationship with someone who has two other partners, you have one partner who has two other partners. You don’t have “1/3 of a partner”. You also have the ability to find other partners, so you have “more” partners than you would if you were in a monogamous relationship with, say, a very busy person.
Whether this kind of relationship is better than none depends on how it goes for you: if your partner is helpful and supportive and you are ok with non-monogamy, then it probably is. I don’t see how this is a “bad deal” at all.
This depends on preference. I know for me that it is far worse than none. This is influenced by such factors as:
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners.
The importance of freedom (ie. the cost of being committed to a 1⁄3 deal.)
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet.
I personally would never go below 1:1 and I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire. There are far, far more people who settle for unhealthy ‘bad deals’ because of insecurities and false assumptions about scarcity of options (for them).
I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire.
This claim gives an impression of being unfalsifiable. Any counter-example could be dismissed as the person being either insufficiently self-aware, insufficiently motivated to work towards a goal or not really desiring a 1:1 relationship. What kind of evidence would lead you to conclude that this is not as rare as you suggest?
Is insufficient self-awareness an impediment you think people could also overcome if willing to develop and work towards a goal or is it merely a convenient label for people who prove unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire?
This claim gives an impression of being unfalsifiable. Any counter-example could be dismissed as the person being either insufficiently self-aware, insufficiently motivated to work towards a goal or not really desiring a 1:1 relationship.
I have seen people make similar claims in a way that is not falsifiable. That isn’t what I’m going for. Let’s see if I can make the terms a bit more concrete:
if that is their desire—Can only really go with self-reports on this one when trying to falsify.
self-aware Are able to notice that they have that desire? (Self reports again) Are they able to make observations about their beliefs, actions and the experiences that result from those actions. (Self reports). Only rudimentary self awareness is required. The process of developing social skills is extremely good at improving self awareness too.
Willing to personally develop—Will take actions and perform activities in order to change themselves. (External behavior which can be observed.)
work towards goals—As opposed to doing nothing. I don’t have any prediction about what happens when you do not take directed action. (Similar to the previous point.)
Rare—Let’s say < 1%. Obviously depends on the specific criteria used for the study.
What kind of evidence would lead you to conclude that this is not as rare as you suggest?
A significant number of people dedicating 3 hours a day for 3 years to the goal of developing social skills and sexual attraction ability and not being able to form a relationship. With that much effort it is extremely improbable for someone without significant mental or physical disability to fail and it would be enough for even most people with moderate disabilities to have quite good odds.
Is insufficient self-awareness an impediment you think people could also overcome if willing to develop and work towards a goal or is it merely a convenient label for people who prove unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire?
Self awareness usually comes with time and maturity. You know, realizing how you act, etc. I include self awareness because obviously anyone who doesn’t realize (or admit to themselves) that they want to achieve a goal or notice what results they currently get will not even bother trying. The people you mention seem to already have plenty of self awareness. If they don’t then they are extremely lucky and someone else has input the relevant goal while they were on auto-pilot.
One more thought: Doing a lot of something doesn’t always make you better at it. There’s practice, and then there’s meaningful practice, and you need meaningful practice to get better, not just any practice.
For example, suppose you’re a poor writer and you’re trying to get better, so you set out to write more stories. However, after spending a lot of time writing, all that happens is that you’ve become better at writing poorly; you don’t suffer from writer’s block any more and can finish a story much more quickly than you used to, but each individual story isn’t much better than the ones you wrote before you practiced. What went wrong?
You’re the best chess player in your area, and you want to get better after getting trounced in a regional tournament. You play lots of chess games, and you rack up more and more wins against the people you always beat anyway. You then go to another regional tournament, and lose just as badly as you did before. What went wrong?
You’re the worst chess player in your area, and you want to get better. So you play a lot of chess games against your computer, but it seems that no matter what you do, you still lose, and you don’t seem to be any better at beating human players, either. What went wrong?
You want to be a better pianist, so you spend a lot of time practicing a number of songs on the piano until you’ve completely mastered them. This takes a long time. You then sit down to play a new song you’ve never played before and have a lot of trouble with it. It takes you just as long to master as all the others. What went wrong?
It’s pretty easy to practice something and never get any better, or only show improvement in a small part of a larger skill set.
You’re right, 3 hours a day practicing how to drop a piano on your toe will not help you learn to be a concert pianist, nor will 3 hours slamming the keyboard shut on your genitalia help improve your sex life. Between ‘self-awareness’, ‘willing to work’ and most particularly ‘willing to personally develop’ is the necessity to be willing and able to google ‘how to date’.
Something like that, yes. Or look at what successful daters are doing and acting kinda like what they do instead of doing the opposite and failing for another three years.
I think you’re neglecting some possible failure modes. Unless you deny the existence of failures of the kind CronoDAS describes they don’t seem to be fully accounted for by your model. Why is it that some things that others find difficult we find relatively easy and others that others find easy we find relatively difficult? I think there is a bit more to the answer than means, motivation and effort.
I can think of examples of things I have accomplished relatively easy that many others seem to find difficult or impossible. I can also think of things that I have made some significant effort to become good at and have met with limited success and have ultimately abandoned. I think the reasons for success or failure when trying to develop some new ability are a little more complex than you seem to be implying.
I guess I was hoping that on reflection you might be able to offer some advice intermediate between ‘it’s easy, google it’ and ‘it’s hopeless, give up now’. This is not a criticism—I know I am largely unable to offer any constructive advice on the things I am good at to people who would like to become good at them.
Thanks for the clarification. Your criteria for judging if it is someone’s true desire, willingness to personally develop and for self-awareness are significantly weaker than I had anticipated. The time commitment is rather higher. That level of commitment seems likely to eliminate quite a few people as it is on the order of other goals that have a significant failure or drop out rate (completing a university degree, achieving and maintaining significant weight loss, mastering a musical instrument, sport or physical activity).
Your claim seems plausible with that level of time commitment but it seems to me that it gets into somewhat ambiguous territory. For skills that require that level of commitment to develop it is unclear to what extent ‘anyone’ can acquire them since intrinsic motivation and innate talent become hard to separate. It is not quite on the level of ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just learned to play the piano’ but it is somewhat similar. To what extent is failure to follow through with the commitment to acquire the skill a lack of talent or a lack of drive?
The level of commitment I list as minimum primarily an indication of how confident I am in making predictions regarding the success of individuals at 5 std deviations below the norm. If someone else has more familiarity with that class of people they would be able to specify a more realistic picture. I gave my criteria to demonstrate that such a claim is, in fact, falsifiable.
It is not quite on the level of ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just learned to play the piano’
It is even more like: ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just spent 3 hours a day for 3 years practicing the piano’. (Except the piano thing is way harder.)
To add some perspective and as a belated reply to CronoDAS I would expect that anyone who could not get a relationship after spending 3 hours a day for 3 years trying and practicing would not be able to manage a full time job anyway.
If we’re talking about what it takes for me to have extremely high confidence that exceptions will rare then I need to be conservative. Most people need less but there are some, I’m quite sure, who do need to work extremely hard!
Three hours a day for three years doesn’t seem compatible with having a full-time job.
It is if (hypothetical generic) you have no ‘life’. The three hours a day could include one hour while commuting (studying, preparing and reviewing). All other social commitments that you have also count towards the three, assuming you do use them to develop and experiment with your social skills. Finally, I think it would be safe to relax the conditions of the ‘maximum required to expect rare exception’ such that the weekly average is 3h/d.
It is, but it is far from a trivial commitment. I, for example, wouldn’t bother spending so much time. Just wouldn’t care enough. But I am not a slow learner and even without explicit practice I could meet the minimum condition (“a simple relationship”). That is a fairly low bar, most people spending significant time could be expected to work towards a more specific kind of relationship with a partner ranking higher in their preferences.
…it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire.
It’s all about what you want. I would happily go below 1:1 (though generally things are more complicated than ratios), because the values of the factors you listed are very different for me than they seem to be for you.
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners: Moderate but not unduly burdensome.
The cost of being committed to a particular deal: Low. If the relationship is a net loss I would want to leave anyway, and if it isn’t then it doesn’t preclude me forming new ones.
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing: High. A shared partner is definitely better than no partner for my wellbeing, and a shared partner is even generally superior to an unshared partner, not least because of compersion.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual: None. If I have a need I can’t meet myself, allowing someone else to meet it is a pretty good deal, and even if they stop I’d be no worse off than before.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet: High. For the most part my relationship satisfaction doesn’t totally correlate with the amount of time I can spend with a partner, and whatever time is needed to maintain the relationship properly is usually enough to be reasonably satisfying.
Preferences should always determine lifestyle. I realize that our preferences are radically different, but that doesn’t mean that I and others like me are necessarily getting a “bad deal.” I suspect that if I were to take your approach it would make me miserable, but that is not a criticism of your approach.
It should be noted that the bulk of your point is an elaboration of what my answer to ChronoDAS was, yet presented as though it is is response to a position I do not hold, something which I have recently spent effort explaining to you. Whether this is explicitly intended or not it leads me to be increasingly wary of the nature of your comments.
I’ve been getting the impression from your comments that you broadly disapprove of people who have a different set of preferences from you in this domain (i.e., “suckers”). If this is a misunderstanding of your position I apologize.
The difference between insane and evil has meaning to me when people are not acting as enemies. When they are acting with social or political aggression the difference between selective comprehension and Machiavellian political influence can be considered one of ‘implementation detail’.
Once again an ancestor comment has not met my minimum criteria for ‘sane conversation’. This comment is at less than positive 3. Politics isn’t the mind killer, sex is the mind killer!
What argument or evidence would you require in order to believe that the people voting on that comment genuinely believe it to be of unacceptably low quality? I am not one such person (and I didn’t downvote it), but I have a relatively high tolerance for being insulted.
This community seems to frown upon unnecessarily hostile discourse, which strikes me as an entirely sane attitude, and the one of which you have run afoul.
What argument or evidence would you require in order to believe that the people voting on that comment genuinely believe it to be of unacceptably low quality?
… They do genuinely believe it to be low quality… The thing you want me to change my belief on is whether that is a sane judgement to be made by looking at that comment in contrast to the previous one. Sex is the mind killer.
Consider the question updated, then. What argument or evidence would you require to believe that judgment a sane one? Or, more generally, what would be necessary for you to believe that that comment deserves its current score, by your own criteria for “deserve”?
WrongBot, you have already made your epistemic and social political position entirely clear. These questions can be generated for any position held by anyone and me hearing them from you clearly provides me no new information. Trying to make others justify themselves is an effective social move anywhere and the phrasing you have used follows the correct script for this subculture. Yes, you may take some status, it would take someone of far more political ability than I to prevent that.
By way of approximate answer… it would be evidence strong enough to shatter everything I have learned of social dynamics and human thought patterns over the last 5 years.
I remain, as ever, largely indifferent to status. As I have done elsewhere, including in the original posting, I am asking these questions both because I am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes; I am trying to follow the golden rule and offering others opportunities that I would appreciate having offered to me. If you find my questions annoying or of little value, I will stop asking them.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
On the other hand, claiming to not be status-seeking (and honestly believing that too, of course) is a typical mode of status-seeking behavior, and this explanation of your claim seems orders of magnitude more plausible.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people
I’ve considered countering the argument for “deaf people” preemptively in the original comment, but thought it’s too obviously not applicable as analogy to the status thing to be actually used in a counter-argument. Silly me.
It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them.
I won’t say that it’s completely impossible (though it might be) to lack status drives, but that it’s very improbable and would be a serious neurological condition.
Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
Claiming to be deaf is best explained by being deaf in most situations; claiming to not seek status is best explained by a standard pattern in status-seeking present in most people. Besides, I’m not aware of status-breakdown as a known medical condition, which would make me see it as so much less probable, even if it’s known to experts. That there is still a chance for brain-damage being the cause doesn’t allow you to priviledge this particular hypothesis.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
It would? I sure as heck wouldn’t say autistic folks ‘function successfully/efficiently/rationally’ in general, and much of the therapy and education I hear about strikes me as being in part teaching about status sensitivity. (My mildly autistic cousin spent a great deal of time on working on his acting out and misbehaviour and acting ‘appropriately’ - a codeword for status sensitivity if I’ve ever seen one.)
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
I saw this had been voted up to +1 and went to correct it. Then I noticed that it was me who had voted it up, I don’t know why. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, that comparison is idiotic. Why are you comparing autism to a coma? Why not compare it to, say, Triffids taking over the world. That is a bad thing too and only slightly less relevant. Your dismissal of the arguments is also unjustifiably absolute. There is a clear margin at the top of the ‘functional’ spectrum at which AS is personality trait that is far more adaptive in many ways than various other traits that we consider ‘normal’ despite being suboptimal adaptions to the current environment.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
Deafness gives no benefit. AS does, even if they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
My apologies and downvote retracted; I made the unwarranted assumption that this conversation specifically included Asperger’s Syndrome under the Autism umbrella. I may have mixed it up with another thread.
In any case, you’re right. Classical autism is not a good thing.
np. There’s potentially an interesting discussion in Aspies and status sensitivity; are these people high functioning in the ways full-blown/classical autism is not except for social things like status sensitivity?
The biggest difference between Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism and full-blown Autism is IQ, ultimately.
Compared to neurotypical people, Aspies tend to have various social deficits, difficulty regulating emotion, a tendency to become preoccupied with narrow subjects and, less often, motor or sensory abnormalities. Along with lower IQ, full-blown autistics tend to have all of these symptoms (except possibly narrow-subject-preoccupation), and usually to a greater degree.
Agree and add that some of the serious undeniable deficits also vary by degree. An extremely high IQ aspie can also have crippling sensory integration problems while a lower IQ aspie may also have more mild problems to compensate for, leaving him ‘higher functioning’. Even those ‘various social deficits’ can differ in degree from ‘sufficiently below norm’ to irredeemably absent.
I wonder if using the word ‘and’ in the grandparent rather than the word ‘but’ would have better conveyed ‘elaboration’ rather than ‘correction’. I think so. Edited.
It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Though since we do know that there are people who don’t properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.
That being said, I do agree that “they care about status, but don’t want to admit it / but don’t realize it” is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger’s considerably increases my credence their claim, though.
Data point: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. While I haven’t seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it’s at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.
I’m as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it’s as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.
If that counts as a “serious neurological condition,” then we may not disagree at all.
Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people’s actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?
Now that’s an interesting claim. I used to make it myself. What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status? Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status? Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior? How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes;
I could not possibly answer those questions with as much coherence as the question itself. Because that comment is a response to a trivial question and answers it with a one sentence reply then straightforward literal elaboration. In fact, if it did not take so much clicking I would remove every comment I have made on this thread except that one, leaving it as my poor, dead, canary. I still might. It is the kind of thing that appeals to me.
I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot’s claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
If you considered that a threat then I understand why you would disapprove. I did not consider it a threat because by my estimation it would actually be to WB’s benefit and my (externally visible) detriment. People doing out-of-norm things while you are in conflict with them tends to raise your status, even when those things aren’t really anything to do with you. It shows that you are able to affect them, you have some power.
Actually, if I did bother to redact a conversation it would be approximately for the opposite reasoning as a threat. It would remind me that I ultimately cannot change other people’s behavior but I do have the ability to choose what situations I am a part of. Just walk away. Not walk away to prove a point to someone else. People would disapprove of me if I deleted comments, an undesirable thing. It proves a point to me, changing the way I think and respond in the future.
What is the worst thing that can happen if I refuse to engage in what my brain perceives as evil, even in a direct, inelegant or dramatic fashion? Some people will disapprove of me, maybe even think I’m infantile. Without meaning disrespect (AdeleneDawner is someone whose judgement has impressed me), some transient disapproval is not nearly as important as a boost in self-awareness. As a general observation I find that if show myself how to avoid unacceptable things with direct action I find myself able to instinctively and effortlessly avoid them in the future. The opposite to learned helplessness. In a generalized form this is a strategy that is recommended by many personal development and psychological methodologies.
So, while I don’t seem to have chosen to remove my comments here it is something I consider a positive action and would be quite willing to allow myself to do in the future. That being the case, and since it is not possible for you to downvote deleted comments, I will make some comments here to give you the chance to express your outrage in those hypothetical future cases.
My disapproval of the threat of deleting the comments was not based on it being a threat toward WrongBot, it was based on my dislike of incomplete archives: I don’t want to see it become normal for people to delete comments that are part of a conversation, and since I can’t express my irritation at actual instances of that, reacting to instances of people saying that they’re considering deleting comments is the next best option. That said, your reason in this case seems sound enough to be a justifiable exception to that, though I would certainly disapprove if you were to delete this explanation at the same time as the other comments.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status?
While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status?
I don’t believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.
Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior?
I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I’m aware it’s impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.
How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
My sack of neurons isn’t very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.
Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.
That is shortest and the most explicitly circular argument I have ever seen.
You rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of your behavior on the grounds that you are not motivated by status, a belief you explain on the grounds that you are not presented with examples of your status-motivated behavior.
statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
You could point to anything I’ve ever done or said and claim that I did it because I desired status. I rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of my behavior because I believe there is a better explanation. It is possible that I asked him the questions that I did because I wanted to score points; I don’t have access to the workings of my own brain. But crying “status!” is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire.
I think there are several people here who would disagree with you...
Anyway, being that I’m not as self-aware as many people here and am utterly terrified of anything that could be considered “work”, does that make me not a good candidate? :(
I think there are several people here who would disagree with you...
Yes, there are. There are many people elsewhere who would also disagree and many more people who once held that belief, no longer do and coincidentally happen to be far more successful in their romantic lives.
Anyway, being that I’m not as self-aware as many people here and am utterly terrified of anything that could be considered “work”, does that make me not a good candidate? :(
You have far more self-awareness than is required. But yes, the thing with work (combined with internalized shame) would make things difficult for you. Unless, you know, you want to change. ;)
Having been in that kind of position, I found that it’s less of a big deal than you think it is. There aren’t too many practical effects of one’s girlfriend having other boyfriends, given the right mindset. The only unavoidable consequence is that the maximum amount of time said girlfriend can spend with one is less than it might otherwise be. And that makes new boyfriends about as dangerous as new hobbies; that is, not very.
There have also been times when I was the one with the preponderance of partners, and while that was totally sweet, it didn’t have much to do with the partner imbalance. Having more good partners is just… better, regardless. For me, at least.
The only unavoidable consequence is that the maximum amount of time said girlfriend can spend with one is less than it might otherwise be. And that makes new boyfriends about as dangerous as new hobbies; that is, not very.
It is a little crude but this analogy holds best when the ‘hobby’ is collecting and mastering the use of sex toys. Being the one to meet needs for sexual satisfaction is a desirable thing, not least among the reasons for this is that involves you having more sex.
There have also been times when I was the one with the preponderance of partners, and while that was totally sweet, it didn’t have much to do with the partner imbalance. Having more good partners is just… better, regardless. For me, at least.
You would find 5:3 just as good as 1:3? Wow. I cannot imagine that; my instincts must be quite different to yours.
Mmm, not quite. I prefer to avoid group relationships where each person is directly involved with each other person; I wouldn’t mind if such a situation arose purely out of circumstance, but I dislike it as a deliberately engineered dynamic.
For me, the difference between dating three girls who were only dating me and three girls who were each themselves dating two or three other people is quite small. If anything, I might prefer the latter: being entirely responsible for providing emotional and romantic support for three different people is not easy. Not to mention that those other relationships would probably make the girls I was dating happier, which is a very desirable end all by itself.
It is a little crude but this analogy holds best when the ‘hobby’ is collecting and mastering the use of sex toys.
I don’t know if you’ve ever dated a woman with a large toy collection, but I think it’s really more of a huge benefit than a disadvantage.
Assuming from your name that you are female or gender atypical do you mean 5males:3females or the reverse? (I cannot tell whether you went with mine:opposite or male:female.)
Monogamy: High-appeal people date single high appeal people. Low-appeal people date single low-appeal people.
Polyamory: High-appeal people date multiple high appeal people. Low-appeal people date multiple low-appeal people. Sometimes, high-appeal people are willing to date slightly lower-appeal people because they wouldn’t have to break up with a high-appeal partner to do so.
The Bell System monopolized telephone service in the U.S. because of the enormous cost (stringing wires to every customer) any competitor would incur to start to compete with it. (Later, U.S. regulators guaranteed its monopoly but imposed conditions on it, including if I am not mistaken the rates (“tarriffs”) it could charge, so let us restrict our attention to the earlier “unregulated” period.)
IBM monopolized the market for computers in the 1960s and early 1970s because of the largeness of the cost (e.g., retraining the programmers, operators
and users employed by the customer) for the customer to switch to a different vendor.
Yes, since a large part of the benefit a man derives from a sexual relationship depends on the parties knowing each other really well, the time it takes for 2 lovers to get to know each other imposes a significant switching cost on the man and a significant cost on any woman who would try to compete with the initial woman, but the costs do not seem high enough (especially if the man already has female friends and coworkers) to warrant the use of the word “monopoly” and more importantly, the woman in the relationship faces costs just as high, so the strategic situation is much more symmetrical than it is between the Bell System and a consumer wanting telephone service.
So, “monopolist” is not a good choice of word, IMHO.
Some of my relationships are monogamous. The main advantage to them is that they take less time and effort. They can also reduce drama
Unfortunately monogamy involves creating an artificial monopoly on physical and emotional intimacy. The problems with monopolies that you learn in economics class apply to relationships too and constitute or cause a lot of the ‘drama’ of relationships. The Nash equilibrium in games modelling monopolies are very different from those without a monopoly and human instincts often reflect that difference depending on context.
This is counter-intuitive but I find it reasonably accurate. On a related note studies show that women orgasm more often and more powerfully when their partner has been with an other woman even if they are not consciously aware of this fact.
How in the world do you ethically perform a study that shows this?
Err… Oops. I just went to google to try to find the relevant references. Let’s just say that anything you can find on that topic on google would constitute “generalising from fictional evidence”.
Take a group of women who are not in monogamous relationships and who are having sex with men who have other partners. Randomly assign half to group A and half to group B. Take one partner for each woman. Instruct the partners of the women in group A to not have sex with any other women for two weeks, and instruct the partners of the women in group B to have sex with their other partners frequently for two weeks. Ask the women to self-report how pleasurable they find the sex, and how often and powerfully they orgasm. Tell everyone participating in the study about this procedure, and get their consent to it.
It seems like finding a statistically useful number of such scientifically-inclined, polyamorous couples would be quite a challenge.
To be clear, they don’t have to be polyamorous couples: just using women who have a friend with benefits would work.
Don’t know, but the whole “double blind” part sounds kinda fun. :P
How can you have multiple monogamous relationships in the present tense?
I think my observation is consistent given that it covers past relationships, expected future relationships based on existing principles and whatever my current relationship status is as part of my overall time line. I wouldn’t want to say “some of my relationships have been monogamous” even if it is a more simple and precise historical claim because it comes with potential implications regarding current principles and present relationship status which I do not wish to make.
This sounds plausible, though no immediate examples of this leap to mind. Can you give some example?
The very fact that ‘sent to the doghouse’ exists as a cliché is the most obvious illustration. I’ll add that this kind of thing is often bad for both parties. Our instincts aren’t there to make us happy, they are there to gain power, resources and reproductive advantage. Using sex and emotional intimacy to gain power is a common failure mode in relationships and can make both people miserable to a lesser or greater degree but it does work.
(This fact is completely bizarre to me. If anyone tries to punish me to gain control or coerce me in any way they instantly lose any influence they had over me based on goodwill and I automatically feel free to use any or every means available to get what I want. That is, they have absolutely no ethical rights until such time as they are not coercing me. But I learned in primary school that other people are often quite willing to be controlled by punishment.)
I react similarly to attempts at coercion. Is this perhaps an asp thing?
More like a self-esteem thing. Nearly everyone whom I have ever known and respected (and, as far as I know, everyone whom these people know and respect) reacts in that way, and that group includes a lot of people who are as far from aspies as possible.
People who were sincerely friendly and submissive towards their abusers got called many disrespectful names, depending on the context: sluts, boot-lickers, whipped boys, pet doggies, etc.
Do you use asp to refer to Aspergers’ ?(I sometimes see ‘aspie’ but haven’t encountered asp).
It is certainly in there among the big cluster of correlated traits and labels that includes Aspergers’ syndrome and often ADHD. I don’t necessarily qualify for an Aspie label although I quite probably would if I had less IQ. I do know that i would never attempt to coerce any of my friends, lovers or enemies that I identify as having Aspergers’. I wouldn’t expect it to give good results.
Mind you I don’t coerce ‘typical’ others as much as is optimal either. The work of the mind projection fallacy. I have to remind myself that others are ‘spineless pushovers’ (my perspective) or ‘do not have an attitude problem’ (another common perspective).
I use ‘asp’ to refer to both autism-spectrum and archetypical Serpent qualities, because of the pun and the overlap.
Serpent? As in Slytherin (sneaky, tricky, conniving, plotting)? That doesn’t seem like there would be much overlap.
Oddly enough, the archetypal serpent was a well-developed concept before J. K. Rowling was born.
Both involve social incapacity, compensated for with cold analytics. Both are potential sources of powerful knowledge, complicated by disrespect for, or incomprehension of, traditional limits on the safe use of such knowledge. Both have an unnervingly primordial feel.
Don’t worry; I don’t actually think Rowling made that up.
But I’m surprised by the “social incapacity” part: I would think of a serpent as sort of a sociopathic master manipulator.
Doesn’t sociopathy qualify as a type of incapacity?
An emotional one. Not necessarily a social one (though it can be).
Ahh, I may just have to adopt that name. All too apt!
For monogamous relationships, the cost of having an additional partner is much higher: you have to forgo your current relationship, and possibly experience drama and a period of being partnerless. Polyamorous relationships mitigate the cost of having an additional partner.
As a result, a monogamist knows that his or her partner is limited to them for the time being, because the costs of ending a monogamous relationship can be so heavy. A monogamous partner gets a lot of leeway to slack off, take their partner for granted, fail to satisfy their partner, or be a jerk, just as long as this behavior doesn’t create a cost to the other partner that is heavier than the projected costs of a breakup.
Monogamist partners have the ability to partially shut out their competitors. When you know that your partner isn’t able to to sample other potential partners for better matches, you don’t have so much of an incentive to fulfill your partner’s preferences.
Of course, polyamorous partners may also have leeway in how well they satisfy their partners’ preferences, because the partner doesn’t expect to be satisfied in every area by them. Yet the polyamorous person who isn’t satisfying a certain preference of their partner isn’t expecting that their partner stays stuck in that dissatisfaction, because the partner can go elsewhere, at least in principle.
The trick would seem to be trying to get the best of both worlds. In many cases the game (in this case the temptation to slack off and let yourself go) is played unconsciously. Commitment and trust, however, tend to be higher level features. The best lovers are, by hypothesis, able to foster security and trust while at the same time keeping competitive instincts in play. The impulse to satisfy all the partner’s desires before they stray. The spark.
If you control someone’s access to a resource, in this case sex, dating, and romantic interaction, you can set whatever price you want for it.
Real world relationships (and real world commericial monopolies, for that matter) would suggest that this isn’t literally true. The literal truth is that you can set a higher price than you could get if you didn’t have a monopoly.
To be more accurate, you can set whatever price you want, and the other person needs to choose between paying the price and ending the monopoly (by violating the monogamy agreement or ending the relationship). But in the real world people are often very reluctant to end long-standing relationships quickly.
I probably should have said that you can probably get a higher price than you could get in the absence of a monopoly.
People shouldn’t be missing the point that many people like to have a monopoly and its part of the reason many enter monogamus relationships.
There are obviously limitations, humans being what they are and all. From what I can tell people can go to more extreme lengths in real world relationships than real world commercial monopolies. When played well people can be made to give everything they have. It’s seriously pathetic, and painful to watch.
Some people seem to find it hilarious (as in the movie “Saving Silverman,”) at least in fiction. I wonder if there’s a Trope for that.
Speak not Trope’s name lest ye summon it.
del
The prupose of monogamus marraige is to ensure male productivity.
In a way monomgamus norm is sexual socialism for men. Almost everyone has a wife, almost everyone has a child. It redistributes sexual power away from women and the top 10% of men and gives it to the remaining 90% of men, forcing us into K selection, slowing the pace of evolution and equalizing outcomes.
Konkvistador:
That’s a good way of putting it—and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don’t show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.
Michel Houellebecq has an interesting paragraph about this issue in his novel Whatever:
I have a notion that political ideologies are apt to include ideas which are inconsistent with each other, but got bundled together for historical reasons.
That’s certainly true. However, in such cases, one can typically find people who have a greater inclination towards systematization and consistency, and whose overall positions will have clear origins in a particular ideology, but differ from the orthodox positions of that ideology insofar as they’ll have these inconsistencies straightened out somehow. (This will usually not be accepted favorably by their co-ideologists, of course, and will result in their marginalization.)
To take one example, in the historical development of today’s mainstream ideologies, environmentalism got bundled up with leftism pretty much by sheer historical accident. (If you doubt it, consider that an example of a prominent environmentalist from a century ago was Madison Grant.) Thus, there are important points of friction between environmentalism and various leftist ideas that are highly correlated with it today—and although the inconsistencies are usually passed over in silence or answered with implausible rationalizations, one can find people who have pointed them out and ultimately ditched one or the other. (See e.g. this story for one glaring example.)
The issue of economic vs. sexual inequality, however, is one of those cases where the seeming inconsistency is, to the best of my knowledge, without any significant exceptions. This suggests that rather than being bundled up due to historical accident, these positions both stem from some shared underlying motivation. Robin Hanson has written some preliminary speculations on this question, but I think he has only scratched the surface.
del
This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves. (As a side note, excluding love from any discussion of monogamy and its alternatives is already a substantial deviation from reality; a cursory mention is not sufficient.)
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.
Modern society is generally opposed to rape. This should not be a striking or insightful conclusion.
This is just a failure of imagination! There are all sorts of ways a government could redistribute sex, should it so choose:
Economic incentives: pay or give tax breaks to people who have sex with the sex-poor. (If you’re worried about economic coercion, you can limit the payment to those above the poverty level, or create more welfare programs so no one has to depend on sex to meet a certain living condition.) Penalize or charge extra for the sex-rich.
Social and moral incentives: create a publicity campaign through advertisements and mass media to try to change people’s views on sex and attraction.
Leveling out attraction levels: teaching social and flirting skills to the sex-poor and providing them with plastic surgery, personal trainers, or other cosmetic resources. Alternatively, lower everyone to the same level, as in the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron.
Changing men and women’s sex drives and sexual selectivity with neurosurgery, hormonal treatment, or childhood conditioning.
Any or all of these might work, though your last suggestion seems to me to be even worse than wide-scale institutionalized rape. And the Handicapper-General, well, I think that’s the worst of all possible worlds; extinction would be better.
But criticism is easy and having ideas is hard, and I don’t think that you’re taking a bad approach.
Oh, I’m not suggesting that these are good options or that a government should do them: some of them would require a near-totalitarian state to enforce. The easiest and least controversial is probably to teach more social skills and flirting in schools.
But I’m not seeing why the last suggestion is worse than wide-scale institutionalized rape: if we gave young children hormone treatment along with childhood vaccines, and the end result was to balance out levels of sexual selectivity, why is that bad? (I’m not sure this is possible exactly, but there is some evidence that stimulant drugs and changing testosterone levels, for instance, can affect sex drive and selectivity.)
On the other hand most governments go to some lengths to prevent your first option from arising naturally by criminalizing prostitution. Society doesn’t merely not engage in redistribution of sex, it actively campaigns against it. It is interesting to consider why this might be.
Deliberately and permanently altering someone else’s mind to achieve your own ends without their informed consent may not necessarily be evil, but I would never want any human being to be able to do such a thing (as we currently are as a species).
Note that inequalities in matters of love and sex have quite certainly led to countless murders and suicides both. They have probably not killed as many people as inequalities of material wealth, true, but in absolute terms the death toll is still large.
This is a good point, but I think there’s still a distinction. If you’re broke and starve to death, that isn’t (usually) the result of someone’s deliberate choice. But when love or sex drive someone to doing something terrible, it is still ultimately their decision.
I suppose this distinction is complicated somewhat when you take reductionism into account, but in practice it still seems to be a worthwhile one.
If there’s a decent solution to this problem, by the way, I’m listening. It’s certainly an awful state of affairs.
Just in case I was unclear on this matter, I am not arguing in favor of any particular view on these issues at the present moment—I merely wish to point out that there seems to be a discrepancy here that calls for explanation, and that my hunch is that a correct explanation would open a whole gold mine of insight.
That said, I don’t think your replies to these points are at all satisfactory. In particular:
That is all true, however, there is still the undeniable fact that people differ greatly in their attractiveness, that these differences are to a large degree involuntary, and that those blessed with higher attractiveness are offered a great deal of choice and opportunity to achieve these desirable ends in their lives. Whereas those on the bottom are denied virtually any such opportunity, and a large class of not very attractive folks are outcompeted by those in the upper echelons and are thus left with only meager choice and opportunity.
Therefore, even considering all the differences relative to inequalities in material wealth, I don’t think a serious case could be made that harsh inequalities don’t exist in this regard too.
However, tremendous amounts of concern about inequalities in material wealth are voiced even in rich societies where even the very poorest people haven’t been in danger of starvation for several generations. It is clear that those concerned about material inequality in modern developed countries object to it as something that is unjust as a matter of principle, or perhaps because they fear that it might cause social instability. (But even in the latter case, surely it not outright absurd to ask similar questions about the possible social consequences of vast inequalities on the sexual market?)
Nobody was mentioning any such idea. What was mentioned was merely the plausible-sounding hypothesis that in a society with strong monogamous norms, outcomes will be more egalitarian in comparison with a society of sexual laissez-faire, where the immense differences in people’s attractiveness give them vastly unequal opportunities, and those less attractive arguably get a worse deal than under stronger monogamous norms.
Moreover, for an even more extreme test of our intuitions, we can also take an even broader cross-cultural view of things and observe cultures that practice arranged marriage. I have no close familiarity with any such societies, so fairly speaking, I can only suspend judgment, but I certainly don’t see any reason to condemn them harshly outright. (David Friedman relates an interesting anecdote here—I definitely recommend it as an interesting debiasing story.)
As regards Friedman’s anecdote, I have no (ethical) objection to arranged marriage, provided both of the people involved are freely choosing to enter into it and are old enough to understand the consequences of doing so. But this is often not the case with arranged marriages, and so I do object to those specific instances, of which there are many. Happiness is important, but so is choice, even when that choice is to deliberately relinquish some other choice.
Of course harsh inequalities exist, and I have not claimed otherwise. Some people have much more sexual and romantic success than others, and this does seem quite unjust. But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it’s because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.
Whether or not monogamous societies are more egalitarian than sexually laissez-faire ones, coercing one into the other would require a reduction of basic freedoms that I find unacceptable.
Furthermore, I think that the idea of “sexual laissez-faire” that you are discussing here is something of a non-sequitur. No one has suggested that we adopt anything of the sort as a cultural norm; I should note that polyamorous standards include levels of honesty, communication, and egalitarianism that are not at all compatible with any kind of “free market.” You also seem to be operating under the assumption (and I apologize if I’m reading too much into your comments) that such a free market would necessarily involve successful (or possibly “high-status”) men attracting the vast majority of the pool of available women, leaving few options for less successful/attractive men, which ignores the ability of women to form multiple attachments themselves, as well as relationships in which all partners have multiple attachments, which more closely resembles the polyamorous ideal.
WrongBot:
What about reductions of freedom that don’t stem from any legal compulsion or violent threats, but merely from social norms enforced via status and reputation (and, obviously, their consequences on people’s future willingness to maintain and establish various sorts of private relations with you)? Do you believe that these are also unacceptable?
If the answer is yes, then you must perceive any realistic human society, including the one you live in, as a hell of intolerable suffocating constraints. (Honestly, I would lie if I said that I don’t feel a certain sympathy with this perspective—but people are often biased in that they make a big deal only out of certain constraints that bother them, while completely overlooking other even more severe ones that they’re OK with.)
That assumption is, in my opinion, indeed correct, and consistent with what we observe in reality. But I don’t see why you think that I was talking exclusively about men. Less attractive women also get a bad deal in a society where attractiveness is an important status marker, which I see as inevitable under sexual laissez-faire. Moreover, those women who would like to form permanent monogamous relationships, especially if they’re less than stunningly attractive, are faced with much worse prospects in a situation where any man they attach themselves to could be at any moment tempted to defect and try his luck playing the field a bit more before settling down. (Again, note that I’m not contrasting this with a situation where the man would be somehow coerced into attachment, but with a different state of social norms where this would simply be a less attractive option.)
Now, you write:
But this seems to me like fallacious reasoning. You apparently assume that if women are to form multiple attachments, there will be more attachment opportunities for all men, not just those in the upper tiers of attractiveness. Yet in reality, we see some contrary evidence, in that when women become more promiscuous, the additional amount of sex taking place is not at all distributed randomly or equally across all categories of men; instead, those in the upper tiers of attractiveness get the overwhelming part of it. (I know that this is not equivalent to what you have in mind, but I do think that there is enough similarity to provide at least some relevant evidence.)
You seem to imply that under your most favorable social arrangements, there would be some constraints relative to a complete sexual laissez-faire (even one with the usual caveats about consenting adults etc.). But how would these be enforced? Or do you believe that people would spontaneously follow them under some favorable circumstances?
This does seem to be the case. F. Roger Devlin makes a rather bold statement of this argument in this essay (though I dislike his conservative political slant and certain biased terms; also, ignore his criticism of feminist discourse on sexual violence, because it is massively lower quality that everything else he writes and riddled with errors):
HughRistik:
Yes, I read that essay a while ago. Trouble is, Devlin’s writing is of the sort I find most frustrating: it delivers some excellent insight wrapped up in an awful presentation, both because of Devlin’s own exaggerations and the disreputable publication venue. Unfortunately, not many people will be willing to look past these negative signals and make the effort to understand his very solid main arguments. A better presentation of his thesis could have reached a much broader audience, and made for a much better reference in discussions of this sort.
Yeah, I agree. I’m currently looking for some better references on hypergamy. I already have a bunch of refs on greater female selectivity, but I’m finding mixed results on hypergamy because of so many different operationalizations of status.
Casanova may have had 132 lovers, but most or all of them weren’t long-term relationships. There’s an upper-limit to the number of serious romantic relationships one person can maintain at one time, and it’s certainly less than ten and probably closer to five (the highest I’ve heard of is four). Furthermore, I’ve pointed out elsewhere that historically, harems are not devised by women.
If women and men maintain approximately equal numbers of relationships (which they seem to, in the poly community), then the most attractive partners available to you will be at least as attractive as they would have been if everyone were monogamous. It’s a matter of math.
I think you’re a little too confident of the argument you’ve been making throughout the comments on this post. There are no economically well-developed modern societies with a social norm other than monogamy, and there are some indications that ubiquitous birth control is a game-changer, so historical evidence may not apply. We’re all arguing without large-scale evidence. We can (and should) speculate about what alternative social norms would entail, and we can justify those speculations to lesser or greater degrees. But there is no certainty in this debate.
WrongBot:
That’s not really true. In large parts of many rich contemporary societies, monogamous norms have been weakened to the point where a great many people engage in non-monogamous sexual behaviors. Yes, even among those people, the majority seem to consider stable monogamy as a goal to be achieved at some point in the future, but they nevertheless spend significant parts of their lives engaged in casual serial monogamy and promiscuous sex. (And in some lower class environments, even the pretense of monogamous norms has nearly disappeared.)
There is definitely significant large-scale evidence here about what happens (in at least some cases) when monogamous norms break down in a wealthy society. This evidence points quite unambiguously towards female hypergamy, where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place, and women at all levels of attractiveness strive towards men with higher relative status. You can of course dispute the relevance of this evidence, but you definitely can’t deny its existence.
Some men want to help raise children, including children who aren’t genetically their own. I’m not talking about cuckoldry, but adoption or choosing women who already have children. What proportion of men do you think that is?
I realize you’re talking about sex, not children, but how children are raised is part of the effect of sexual norms.
More generally, what you describe just doesn’t seem like the world I’m living in. Admittedly, the world I’m living in is mostly science fiction fandom, but I just don’t seem to see women turning down almost every man in the search for high status men.
What proportion of men are you seeing as excluded from mating if the default is non-monogamy?
I would imagine that the proportion of men who prefer to raise children who are not genetically their own is very low. The proportion of men who are willing to raise children that are not their own because circumstances make it difficult or impossible to have their own biological children or because they desire a relationship with a partner who already has children is probably quite a bit higher.
The stereotype is that the sex ratio in science fiction fandom is heavily skewed in the male direction. Is this stereotype not accurate?
Somewhat, though I don’t think the ratio is that extreme. In any case, if there are more men than women, wouldn’t that increase the variation among men (the high status men would be dramatically higher status) so that if competing for high status men is the most important thing, the competition for the superstars would get more intense.
If there are more men than women I would think you would see more selectivity from women and so more instances of women turning down men than vice-versa. Your original comment implied you don’t see lots of men getting turned down which seems surprising with unequal gender ratios.
There are possible explanations but I’d expect to see a pattern of certain men being consistently overlooked while others had consistent success and that this would be even more pronounced than in society as a whole where gender ratios are more equal. If this is not the pattern you observe I’m curious what you do see and what you think the explanation is.
I see a lot of pretty stable couples.
I admit to spending an annoying couple or three hours on a car trip with a woman who couldn’t talk about anything but her assignation with [big name science fiction author], but that’s the only example I’ve got for extreme status chasing.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are more men in fandom who want sex and can’t get it than women. What I’m disagreeing with is the idea that, given sexual freedom, women will mostly go after the highest status men.
NancyLebovitz:
Mind you, I wasn’t referring to the whole spectrum of male-female relationships that take place nowadays. Lots of folks still live old-fashioned lives centered around monogamous relationships with the goal of marriage, avoiding promiscuity and (as best they can) serial monogamy. Clearly, under a monogamous regime, people typically end up paired with someone who is roughly in the same league, so the above considerations don’t apply.
However, if we talk specifically about promiscuous behaviors, then the above described hypergamous patterns definitely occur. From the perspective of typical men, or for people unfamiliar with the situation, the options enjoyed here by top-tier men really are nothing like the world they’re living in. After all, there are men whose notch counts are in the four-, perhaps even five-digit territory—whereas on the other side of the spectrum, for very large numbers of men, the increase in promiscuity hasn’t expanded their sexual options at all relative to an absolutely prudish regime. It has possibly even lowered them by reducing their monogamous opportunities.
It’s hard to give any definite numbers, and it obviously depends on the concrete arrangements in practice. It also depends on men’s criteria (some men will be reduced to a choice of women who are in a much lower percentile of attractiveness, so they might find all the available choices unacceptable). But in any case, I would say that under a complete breakdown of all monogamous norms, the percentage of men reduced to virtually zero mating opportunities would be in the double digits.
I think that we’re defining norms in slightly different ways. I have been meaning norms to mean “what people should do” and not just “what people do.” I’ve also been stretching monogamy a little to mean the ideal of having only one partner at a time, whether or not that’s in the context of marriage. It’s a fairly common usage, but still easy to be unclear about.
So I would say that serial monogamy is still monogamy, and that promiscuous sex outside the context of any relationship has little to do with relationship styles at all. Your examples point to a failure to enforce monogamous norms while the norms remain unchanged, I would say.
Or perhaps monogamous norms are weakening, and these examples are the result of particular groups not having any strong relationship norms at all; various kinds of polyamory and swinging offer social norms that can be as strong as monogamous ones, but they’re largely unknown.
Again, it’s hard to say. What evidence there is can be plausibly interpreted in quite a few ways, some of which I’m sure neither of us have thought of.
I’m not sure that’s fair. Couldn’t you say that having multiple friends with benefits is a type of ” relationship style,” in a sense?
Again, “take some time between serious relationships to have multiple casual partners” can be a relationship norm, one that appears very common.
I would calling being friends with benefits a relationship; I was thinking more of relatively-anonymous one night stands.
Likewise, casual partners are still partners; I also think that having multiple casual partners is frowned upon much more than you indicate.
You may be assigning too much credence to that news report. It’s really just summarizing an argument between two partisan political parties about marriage’s declining popularity among the poor. The only quantitative data cited is the number of UK marriages in 1972 and the number of UK marriages in 2009, which are not really enough to settle the claims made in the article or your parenthetical.
Which significant large-scale evidence do you have in mind? The lack of citations suggests that you think it’s very obvious, but I can’t think of it. I may well be missing something obvious, but without a cite I don’t know.
cupholder:
You’re right, this wasn’t a good choice of reference, if anything since the claims were made in an explicitly politicized context. However, whichever statistics you look at, there is no doubt that the decline in monogamous norms in many Western countries (and the Anglosphere nations in particular) has been far more pronounced among the lower classes, and that among significant parts of the underclass, the traditional monogamous norms have weakened to the point of collapse. See e.g. some U.K. data here, or the U.S. data here (which conveniently control for race, so that the trends are strikingly obvious as a class phenomenon).
If you just google for the relevant terms, you’ll get tons of statistics corroborating these basic points from various angles.
Regarding citations, one problem here is that when it comes to people’s sexual behavior, social science data based on surveys are of dubious value. As a rule, men report having sex with significantly more women on average than vice versa—a logical impossibility assuming the samples are representative. So, either people lie big time about their sexual behavior even in anonymous surveys (which sounds quite plausible to me), or the samples always turn out to be critically unrepresentative. (Here is one attempt at the latter sort of explanation.)
Nevertheless, the existing data suggest pretty convincingly that when it comes to the distribution of the total number of sex partners, men’s distribution has a much wider variance than women’s. See this article (unfortunately not available ungated) for references. This observation is consistent with the scenario where women at all levels of attractiveness strive towards men at higher levels, so that men near the bottom get nothing, while those in the upper tiers are making out like bandits.
However, even regardless of any research data, things should be obvious from common knowledge and everyday observations. There are clearly lots of men around for whom getting into any relationship with a woman would be a Herculean accomplishment, even more of those who struggle with positive but still meager results, and a minority for whom getting laid with attractive women is almost trivial, who easily rack up many dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of notches. (Of course, this is a continuum, not a sharp division.) This is the situation to which the weakening of monogamous norms in recent decades has led, and it surely constitutes evidence of the sort whose existence WrongBot denied in his above comment.
Thanks! I think I misinterpreted your earlier post; when I wrote the grandparent comment, I had read ‘monogamy’ as you referring to faithful long-term one-on-one relationships, not just the subset of those relationships that are marriages. But it sounds like you mean marriage proper, in which case I think you’re right (albeit depending on what scale of ‘environment’ we’re talking about).
If I’m honest, my own everyday observations and knowledge don’t seem to be strong evidence of all three of: (1) breakdown of monogamous norms, (2) a concurrent increase in female hypergamy ‘where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place’, and (3) a causal relationship between #1 and #2. It doesn’t help that I didn’t even hit adolescence until last decade—I expect I have much less experience of relationship trends over time than you.
It seems plausible to me that men have a much wider variance in heterosexual sex partners than women, but I’m not sure it’s definitively confirmed—or that the variance ratio has increased over the last few decades because of a decline in monogamous norms. The PNAS article suggests that a failure to account for prostitutes in sex surveys can explain the male-female difference in mean number of sexual partners, which hints that it might also explain the male-female difference in variance, too. (After all, excluding female prostitutes from a survey is a little like chopping the right tail off the female sex partner distribution, which would decrease its variance.) The other review article doesn’t seem to suggest a clear trend in the male-female variance ratio over time, either, although it looks like there is (surprisingly—at least to me) little high-quality data for judging that.
It’s interesting to note that the difference goes away when the women are told they’re hooked up to a lie detector.
That’s a cute result!
For anyone else curious about the published paper, it’s freely available. Annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to say the standard deviation of number of sex partners for women under each condition, only averages, so it’s hard to do an independent statistical check. The authors did do their own test:
The ‘bogus pipeline condition’ is one where the women were hooked up to a (not working) lie detector.
However, there’s still a difference.
Apparently, there was no experiment with the men hooked up to a (bogus) lie detector, and I think there should have been.
I also have no idea what proportion of the population is cynical about lie detectors. I don’t even have a strong prior on that one.
A much smaller one, which may well be within statistical bounds. Good point about people knowing that lie detectors don’t work. That may account for any remaining difference.
Sure there was:
Thanks—goes to show I should have read the linked material.
I’m surprised. I’d have expected that men would lie about having more partners rather than fewer, but that might be mere stereotyping on my part.
The other possibility I can think of is that people who think they’re hooked to a lie detector don’t just say what they immediately think is true, they check their memories more carefully.
Or maybe the sample’s not representative of most men—the sample was of Midwestern psychology undergraduate students.
One question answers the other. I don’t imagine, by the way, that polyamory will ever be the norm, nor do I think it should. The social arrangement I favor most involves each individual freely choosing whichever option they prefer; I imagine that under such circumstances no one style of relationship would predominate.
I disagree. Polyamory is as has often been said something we do anyway. Just less honestly.
Female hypergamy and male vanity (everyone likes to think of themselves as high value) most likley ensure that this [poliamory] will at least for some time be the dominant arrangement in Western society.
I know the Roissyisphere isn’t very popular here but the spirit of this particular saying of his rings true: “To the average woman five minutes of alpha is worth five years of beta.”
Polyamory requires honesty, by definition. Ethical non-monogamy is different from non-consensual non-monogamy. This discussion can’t go anywhere if you’re redefining words to mean what you want them to mean. If you want to talk about the category of practices that includes everything but monogamy, use “non-monogamy”. If you want to talk about dishonest non-monogamy, use “non-consensual non-monogamy” or “cheating.”
How do you classify a relationship between >2 people, where the people involved have an agreement not to date other people, and where one of the members does so anyway?
Cheating. Possibly lying. But also polyamory.
The appropriate label to use is the one that best describes what the people in the relationship have agreed to, implicitly or explicitly. Cheating doesn’t turn a monogamous relationship into something else, it’s just a violation of the relationship’s rules. Ditto with a polyamorous one.
And this does happen, by the way, and when it does, it’s usually really awful. Monogamous cheating is bad enough, but when you’re in a triad (or a quad, or...) you do at least as much damage to several people. More, probably, considering that there’s usually more trust and clear negotiation involved.
A multi-way relationship where one of the people is cheating. I guess you could call it a non-consensual open multi-way relationship.
You did catch the context?
A supposedly monogamous relationship where one or both members cheats is non-consensually open and non-consensually non-monogamous. A supposedly closed polyamorous relationship where one or more members cheats is also non-consensually open, but I don’t see how it makes sense to consider it non-polyamorous.
Well, it’s non-monogamous, but it doesn’t meet the ideals of polyamory. I guess it depends on your definition. I think it makes the most sense to consider it an unsuccessful attempt at a polyamorous relationship.
I like the point and love the expression thereof.
WrongBot said:
To the extent that sexual and romantic success is related to non-innate qualities, those qualities could be distributed more equally. Based on my experience with the seduction community, many components of sexual and romantic attractiveness are based on behaviors that can be learned, particularly in the case of male sexual attractiveness to women. Currently, these skills are not distributed equitably, leading to vast disparities in social skills related to romantic success that are not required by biologically-based differences in aptitude. Once someone gets set on the wrong “track,” then they end up greatly lacking in procedural knowledge. As I argued here, these disparities are unjust.
I saw that post earlier and I think I largely agree with it. Consider that quoted assertion retracted: education in social skills may be an ethical way to systematically reduce inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity. I’m not without my criticisms of the seduction community, but discovering and documenting processes that allow people to become genuinely more attractive is praiseworthy.
Tangentially, while women seem to be better at acquiring social skills on average, I think most people underestimate how many of them would be interested in a PUA-like program, if it were presented in the right way. (Which is to say, not how the PUA community represents itself to men. Different social norms and all.)
Why? Women already have their PUA act together. They understand very clearly that physical beauty is the key factor in attracting men, and have a huge industry for creating fake physical beauty.
In general, I think it’s a gross mistake for men to think women “have it easier”. I would guesstimate that the typical woman spends a way bigger share of her time and money on being attractive to the opposite sex than the typical man. They’re more aware of the game, they start playing it earlier, they coach each other all the time… no wonder they win! As a male, I was able to increase my attractiveness hugely as soon as I realized this was worth making a serious effort: say, the equivalent of one workday (8 hours) per week in total. From what I’ve seen, most men can’t be bothered to spend even that much, while most women are conditioned to spend more than that.
For many men their actual work days are to some degree part of a serious effort to be attractive to women. The ‘traditional’ advice to become attractive to women is to develop a good, stable career, achieve a degree of material success and maintain reasonable health, fitness and appearance. The fact that it is not terribly effective advice on its own doesn’t mean that lots of men don’t put a good deal of effort into following it.
Your proposed theory implies a nice testable prediction and a nice policy recommendation: men should make better worker bees on average, and we should pay them more. Haha, oh wait.
The difference between “women” and “most women” is vast. Some men benefit much more from PUA than others, and those men have some characteristics in common. There are women with those characteristics who I suspect would benefit from a PUA-like program in the same way that men do. But perhaps not; I’m not much of an expert on the seduction community.
You’re committing the typical mistake that I will call symmetrism: thinking that men and women have mostly equivalent roles in mating, may benefit from similar advice, etc. This is an easy mistake to make because men aren’t all that different from women in many other areas. But mating is special: it is the whole goddamn reason why we have these concepts of “males” and “females”, so by default you should expect huge differences instead of equality!
From this perspective it’s pretty easy to dissect your comment. PUA is an attempt to honestly formulate what attracts women. If you wanna have the female equivalent of PUA, you need to formulate what attracts men. Honestly, is that hard? Men are attracted to youth and physical beauty. Gee, I wish women had some kind of industry that supplied that to them… Oh wait.
However, you seem to be confusing tactics with strategy. For women, maximizing physical attractiveness will clearly result in an immediate tactical advantage, but it won’t magically make their strategy sound, especially in the long term. And in this regard, there is certainly lots of deluded and clueless behavior by women going on, and good advice is hard to find and drowned in a sea of nonsense.
That’s far from all we’re attracted to… there’s also what some folks refer to as “feminine radiance”—the female counterpart of male confidence or presence, though it’s quite different in form. (For example, it involves a lot more smiling.)
I’ve seen women with this quality draw crowds, even if they’re not that young or beautiful-looking (when they’re not smiling).
And I would imagine this is a quality that can be taught, just as men can be taught to have increased confidence and presence.
Yep, I know exactly what you’re talking about because I met several women like that and I try to learn from them whenever I can. In a more fair and just world, this feminine quality would attract men more than “mere” beauty. But it doesn’t. Not even for me; it makes for a pleasant bonus afterward, but it’s not really enough to outweigh bad looks up front.
This state of affairs is quite sad and I’m actually trying to change it, modify myself to like “radiant” girls more than pretty girls, because I feel this is the right thing to do. Both for them and for me.
Your parenthetical makes it sound like the effect is transient, perhaps even under control. How sharp is the effect? What do you think of the story about Marilyn Monroe? (original source)
One of the reasons that I’m not interested in PUA is that (most of) the community sees trends and thinks they are laws. The women who I imagine could benefit from a PUA-style program are the ones who want to attract men that are interested in more than youth and physical beauty, but don’t know how to present themselves as interesting because most of the dating advice they get completely ignores that factor. I know that these women exist because I am dating one and friends with others.
Generalization can be a useful tool, but not when you’re specifically looking at a subset of the group.
ETA: I would also agree with Vladimir’s objection.
I think that you and cousin it are both right, but using different definitions of the word “attraction.” He seems to be using it to mean specifically sexual attraction, such as arousal. Since male sexual attraction seems primarily related to looks, women indeed have plenty of advice for fulfilling that preference. You seem to be using attraction in a broader sense, to describe not just desirability on a sexual level, but desirability as a partner. For components of partner desirability other than raw sexual attraction (e.g. relationship desirability), women may need just as much help as men, and benefit from approaches similar to PUAs.
For instance, PUAs discourage showing overt insecurity to potential mates. The theory is that insecurity lowers female attraction to males on a sexual level. Now, while insecurity probably doesn’t lower male sexual attraction to women, it probably does lower women’s desirability on a platonic level to many men, so women could still benefit from PUA-style advice for avoiding displays of insecurity (e.g. avoiding “qualifying oneself”).
I’ve dated a couple women who constantly put themselves down, and while it didn’t change my sexual attraction to them one bit, it did lower their desirability as a longer-term partner (so you could say that it lowered my “attraction” to them, in the broader sense of attraction).
A lot of pickup discourse includes advice other than sexual attractiveness, such as:
avoiding insecurity
creating and facilitating connections
frame control (i.e. managing who’s epistemology is running the interaction, and making sure that you are at least an equal partner in the assignment of meanings to things)
telegraphing your expectations and desires about where you want things to go
status (probably not quite so important for women, but acting dramatically lower status than a guy will often lead to not being taken seriously as relationship material)
systematic practice, and being honest about oneself about your results, capabilities, and areas in need of improvement
And even for sexual attraction, there are PUA-like approaches that would help women attract men: for instance, knowing how to approach a guy, flirt with him, tease him, and make sexually suggestive comments that make him interested.
Thank you. Those are exactly the sorts of advice I was thinking of, and you’re entirely correct about the broader sense in which I was using “attraction” (though, incidentally, I find that displays of insecurity are a turn-off).
What makes you think a PUA-like program would help the subset of women you’re talking about? Do you think the men they’re interested in are woman-like in some respect, so the same techniques would work on them? I can’t understand your argument, maybe I’m misreading it.
A PUA-like program (i.e., one that focuses on improving social skills) would help the subset of women who are interested in attracting the subset of men who place a high value on social skills.
Do you believe that there are some traits that are quintessentially female?
The interesting aspects of attraction are the psychological ones. You’re oversimplifying male attraction if you think it’s all about youth and beauty: what makes men attracted to women who aren’t young and beautiful sometimes? What makes a man commit if he has other options of equivalent youth and beauty? Psychological and mental attraction are relevant here as well. Some of the techniques are similar for men as well as women (showing scarcity, for instance, is fairly universal), while others may be different for women.
I think that a lot of the difference in views is due to some people using broader or narrower definition of “attraction.”
I don’t have anything to add, I just wanted to jump on the indignation bandwagon.
How dare you say such a thing, you terrorist! Whenever someone says that men don’t already get the assistance toward attraction that women do, I feel like 9/11 happened all over again.
Where are you spending your 8 hours? Are we talking about haircuts, shoes, tans, skin care, and cosmetic muscles—or about verbal and psychological PUA-Game?
What do you mean by fake? I personally find most forms of female makeup, cosmetic surgery, high heels, etc. unattractive, but I find it difficult to understand how appearance-modification can be fake. Isn’t all appearance an inherently unreliable signal as to core content? I mean, if for some absurd reason I were thinking of marrying someone who I didn’t trust, and I wanted to know if she were (say) in good long-term health, I wouldn’t just check to see if she had nice long hair and clear skin—I would ask to see her medical records and her parents’ medical records.
When a woman does take steps to make her skin appear clearer, I don’t take this as a way of fooling or faking me into thinking that she has an unusually good immune system—I see it as a way of satisfying her superficial urge to look pretty and my superficial urge to date someone who looks pretty. And, basically, I’m OK with that. I don’t see it as fake, because, assuming it’s done right she actually does look prettier. There’s nothing going on here that’s both fake and relevant. Obviously she might look different when she wakes up in the morning than when she goes out clubbing, but it takes an unusually naive person not to quickly figure that sort of thing out and adjust for it.
I mostly spend my time experimenting with body language and face expressions to make a higher percentage of random women feel instant attraction. Think “smiling across the room”. No haircuts or tans, but also almost no verbal game and no “inner game”. YMMV.
You seem to have assumed that I used “fake” as a synonym for “bad” and immediately rushed to defend… uh… something you thought you should defend. I see this reaction often, and it troubles me.
Could I get more details on how you do this? Are you talking about a Marlon Brando-esque smile/smirk? 8 hours a week just for body language and facial expressions without accompanying conversation seems like a lot. Do you also practice conversation with them? What happens when they do feel attraction?
I tend to mostly focus on conversation, but this is probably something I should work on.
I go to crowded clubs, move around and try to interact with as many people as I can. (Two nights a week is more than 8 hours.) Catch someone’s attention, approach, do what makes sense, repeat. I do end up having many conversations but don’t think of this as “verbal game”, because talking never seems to tip the odds in my favor if they weren’t good to begin with. The first five seconds of nonverbal interaction allow me to predict with exceptional accuracy whether that person will be attracted to me. Maybe I’m doing “verbal game” wrong, though. Or maybe my initial prediction actually has causal power and influences my “verbal game” in subtle ways :-)
I hope not! I’m genuinely curious what you mean by fake. Even in a context devoid of moral judgments, “fake” seems like a natural antonym of “natural” or “real,” and both of those words seem unreasonably vague to me for effective communication. The only coherent, tight definition of “fake” that I can imagine right now is “a false signal,” as in, “that rattlesnake’s bright yellow patterning is fake; it’s not really poisonous.” I find that most people don’t mean “false signal” when they say fake, though, so I’m trying to find out what you mean by it. Maybe you know another tight definition and you can teach me about it.
As for being defensive, well, yes, that’s a character flaw of mine. Please let me know if you have any specific advice for overcoming it beyond “be more inclined to assume the best of people,” and I will carefully consider it.
WrongBot:
While inequalities of love and sex don’t usually kill, I would claim that those inequalities can be significantly harmful. For people who want to have partners, not being able to tends to trash their mental health. Look into involuntary celibacy, and love-shyness. Gilmartin’s work on men with “love-shyness” who experienced significant heterosexual anxiety and impairment found them to be depressed and have violent fantasies. They had suicidal thoughts, but he concluded that they were too depressed to even attempt suicide. His book can be downloaded for free here (despite the caveats on that page, it is a must-read for anyone who finds that these difficulties ring a bell).
While this is an important observation, Houellebecq has no political interest in changing the system. He just analyzes romantic and sexual frustration, which is not as bad material inequality, but a very good topic for dramatic fiction.
Whose purpose?
That was proorly phrased I agree. I should have said monogamus marriage emerged as a semiwidespread norm because societies that had it oucompeted other societies.
Also it may fit the purposes of several historical pseudosocial engineers (founders of religions and city states, rulers, village elders, ect.).
I’ve actually been thinking that polyamory would be closer to sexual socialism in increasing people’s chances of getting a partner. Limiting ourselves exclusively to heterosexual people for a moment, with an uneven amount of men and women, monogamy guarantees that some people will have to remain outside a long-term commitment. In a polyamorous environment, where people can freely choose to form pairs, triads, etc., this is much easier to avoid.
Theoretically, yes. So I don’t know why you are getting down-voted. My initial reaction was to disagree, and that things would only work that way if people’s preferences were uncorrelated, such as from attractiveness being equally distributed among the population. Since that is not the case, the more choice you tend to give people, the more they would gravitate towards the most attractive people of the gender they are attracted to.
Yet there could be another effect in the opposite direction. Under monogamy, you can only be with one person, so you have to make sure you are really into them. Yet under polyamory, it you could get together with people who are lower on your scale of attractiveness without suffering an opportunity cost of forgoing a higher attractiveness partner.
Under non-monogamy, I would speculate that with straight women, the first effect predominates (going for the most attractive people). With straight men, the second effect (being willing to compromise on the attractiveness of partners) may play a stronger role than it does with straight women.
Even if appealing traits are distributed unevenly, the most appealing people will still only have the time for a limited number of relationships at a time. In a monogamous world leads to high-appeal people being paired with high-appeal people and low-appeal people being paired with low-appeal people. I would expect the same phenomenon to mainly persist in a polyamorous world, with the exception that it wouldn’t be just couples anymore and, for the reasons you note, the stratification would probably be somewhat less harsh.
I’m not sure if there is any actual evidence for this conclusion. In a polyamorous world (and considering for simplicity only heterosexual relationships), if women of all levels are strongly inclined towards the upper tiers of men, to the point where they prefer a polyamorous arrangement involving more women than men, but restricted to men of higher appeal, this can lead to far more inequality than any monogamous world. In this scenario, it may happen that men from the lower tiers get shut out of access to women altogether, while those from the top enjoy arrangements involving many women and few men, or even exclusive polygynous arrangements. Among women, too, there would be a severe stratification with regards to how favorable arrangements are realistically available to them depending on their attractiveness.
Considering the evidence from quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread nowadays, i.e. serial monogamy and promiscuity, this scenario doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me. Of course, these behaviors are not identical to what would happen in a hypothetical polyamorous society, but they still provide significant information about the revealed preferences of both men and women.
Personally, I’ve seen more examples of polyamorous arrangements involving more men than women than the opposite. Of course, this might be just sampling bias, and obviously it would hardly be any better if men were the ones who got shafted.
I’m pretty sure there is a decisive sampling bias there, since men in the top tiers of attractiveness are, in all likelihood, severely underrepresented among those practicing explicit “card-carrying” polyamory. Therefore, it seems to me that the patterns of quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread in the general population provide a much better indication as to what would happen if polyamory became the general norm—and these point pretty clearly towards the scenario I described above.
Why?
I know several incredibly attractive men in the poly community; my sample is small enough that I can’t say such men are over-represented in the poly community, but I would be very surprised if your assumption were correct.
I would guess that Vladimir_M is using attractiveness in a broader sense than merely physical. Since power, wealth and status are important components of attractiveness for most women when judging men and since being openly polyamorous would be somewhat problematic for men in many traditionally high status positions it is likely that they will be underrepresented. They are also likely to be overrepresented in non-open / non-consensual non-monogamy.
I was likewise using attractiveness in that broader sense. I can’t speak to wealth, but the poly subculture contains men with plenty of power and status within the poly subculture. Status only has meaning within a particular social context; evaluating a poly man’s status in the context of the greater monogamous culture is no more meaningful than evaluating a monogamous man’s status in the poly subculture. It’s apples and oranges.
Your definition of attractiveness makes no sense in the context of Vladimir_M’s post.
I’m not sure of Vladimir’s reasoning, but I might speculate that men at the top tiers of attractiveness don’t even need to join the poly community to have multiple partners.
Furthermore, being poly may have certain correlates (e.g. geekiness) that are only attractive to subsets of the female population (e.g. the subset that is poly).
HughRistik:
Yes, that’s pretty much what I had in mind. For a man of very high attractiveness, becoming a card-carrying polyamorist is a deal that brings no real benefit for the cost. Such men already have a rich array of options in which they’ll have the upper hand, including polygynous arrangements.
As I understand it, polyamory is having multiple committed relationships, not just multiple partners. I don’t think having multiple partners is limited to only the “top tiers of attractiveness” for men; I think it’s fairly common.
I doubt anyone joins the poly community just to have multiple partners; it seems like way too much work building relationships for that, when you could just find friends with benefits. Someone who just wanted multiple partners would likely not bother; however, people who have been in successful poly relationships likely have a lot of experience and practice in dealing with sex and emotions and managing relationships, which would increase their attractiveness.
Suckers. (That is, on average I do not expect they are making the best decision there and could benefit from making different arrangements.)
Downvoted for “suckers” being unnecessarily aggressive and implying that anyone who doesn’t share a particular taste in relationships is doing it wrong.
I acknowledge your right to have an opinion and have downvoted it for being an influence contrary to my preferences and also for making a false accusation (which I shall expand on since it is a nearly universally made error that is essentially built in to human reasoning).
No. There is a difference between preferences and decisions. In economics the preferences of agents are often more or less defined by what they actually choose. Yet this is only the case in practice when the agent is super intelligent and Coherently Extrapolates (or otherwise has coherent) Volition. Preference is subjective but the preference of an agent is also an objective fact about the stat of the universe. People can be wrong about what they prefer and (as I said) definitely make decisions that do not benefit them. Sexual behaviors are among the most readily influenced of human decisions and also the most frequent case in which people’s decisions do not really benefit them.
I do make the particular presumptive normative implication that you accuse me of, I do make other implicit normative claims that can be the valid subject of your disapproval.
“Suckers” is a normatively loaded expression, one generally interpreted to be condescending. (Dictionary.com: “sucker: Informal: a person easily cheated, deceived, or imposed upon.”) I’m aware of the difference between preferences and decisions, and I wouldn’t have downvoted you if you didn’t have that word there.
I’m not saying that you necessarily intended your comment to sound condescending and aggressive, but that’s how it comes off as.
You did not understand the grandparent.
This is not remotely in question and quoting from the dictionary for the word ‘sucker’ is condescending and bizarre. I went out of my way to make it clear that my argument is that you were condemning the wrong thing, an objective thing that is other than the normative claim present. You criticize not something for which I merely have a different opinion, it is something that is not subject to opinion at all.
This may be the case but your comments do not apply such awareness to the context.
Neither condescension nor aggressiveness are things that I would try to deny. For the issue of human vulnerability to detrimental sexual influence I actually consider them a right and appropriate response. That position of mine is one with which it is possible to disagree and condemn (even though such behavior should be discouraged). But saying things that don’t make sense while condescending, well, that is one of the unforgivable curses.
My apologies, then. No condescension was intended, but this community is known to have both a large number of people on the autistic spectrum as well as non-native speakers of English. I have personally used offensive language without realizing it to be that, in the past (though not on this site, I hope).
I think I got what you’re saying now, but just to be sure. When you said:
did you mean to say that you were not expressing disapproval to people having a preference for situations with more women than men, but rather expressing disapproval to people thinking they had this preference?
On a note almost certainly not divorced from the topic of the autistic spectrum it is amusing to note that I don’t object all that much to being accused of acts of aggressive condescension but that when I get accused of something in a way that isn’t the right accusation it resolves in my evaluation as outright evil.
Closer, and that is something that my words could legitimately be taken to imply. More precisely I would say that I object to “the act of succumbing to influences that lead one away from one’s preferred outcomes in a manner that should be obvious due to maladaptive emotional insecurities.” That happens to be a flaw in human psychology, a maladaptive left-over from a different environment, that has particularly negative consequences, is often exploited at a cultural level and that I have a personal vendetta against.
Very well. In that case, I continue to express my disapproval for a variety of reasons, including:
If someone really does succumb to influences that lead away from their preferred outcomes due to emotional insecurities, then acting derisive is likely to only make them defensive and less likely to actually change their behavior.
In general, I think we should seek to foster a positive atmosphere on LW. It makes the site more pleasant to read, and avoids the risk of misunderstandings (like mine above) that arise from provocative language.
Even though your hypothesis of “this is emotionally suboptimal behavior for a large fraction of people” does sound plausible, there’s still a considerable chance that you might be wrong. It seems to me that a good heuristic is “be very careful about the kinds of thinking you’re loading with negative affect, or people might become unwilling to properly update in favor of that thinking afterwards”.
This is especially so since regardless of whether or not that’s right for the majority, there are almost certainly bound to be people for whom that kind of behavior is in fact the emotionally optimal one. Loading negative affect on that behavior can cause them lasting emotional harm.
Expressing things in strong and confrontational tones will also make it socially harder for you yourself to update in a different direction afterwards (if that turns out to be necessary), so that sort of behavior should be discouraged.
I agree with you on that, but I don’t see why you think that’s what’s going on with consensual polyamorous relationships.
That isn’t something I have said.
Anyway, I just noticed the great grandparent is standing at −2. I would accept that as par for the course for a clearly provocative ‘suckers’ call but −2 for the linked comment in the given context is a violation of my criteria for good faith participation. Since I don’t actually have an agenda to pursue here there given the freedom from self imposed ethical limitations my usual policy is to just ignore the conversation.
I upvoted it, just so you could respond. I’m curious what you did mean then. I thought you said something like that men in polyamorous relationships where men outnumbered women were not making the best decision, that it was a “detrimental sexual influence,” and that they were “succumbing to influences that lead one away from preferred outcomes in an obvious way due to maladaptive emotional insecurities.” Would you please explain why you think that? It doesn’t make sense to me, because such a relationship would be likely to give them supportive friends and partners, and allow them the freedom to find other partners as well.
:) Nice way to circumvent my precommitment!
Your question is reasonable but I if I replied in full it would change my previous stance to a coercion attempt rather than ejection according to my principles!
More practically, I think getting a shared understanding here would involve extensive comparing and contrasting of our underlying models of human behavior. Since claims about how humans think and act can sometimes be sensitive I thought we’d be better off if I left my meaning ‘lost in translation’. :)
Is 1⁄3 of a partner better than none?
That depends on the opportunity cost. Are you spending a lot of resources on this 1⁄3 of a partner, and can you reallocate them to get a better deal elsewhere? For example, if the girl doesn’t demand anything and just comes over sometimes to have sex, I don’t care if she spends other nights with other guys. But if she gives me drama or drains my money, I’ll do the calculation and tell her to gtfo.
Reading this comment has suddenly clarified the nature of our disagreements. We have completely incompatible priorities when it comes to dating, I think, and so any disagreement we might have can probably be chased back to those priorities, independent of particular pieces of evidence or reasoning.
I would also like to know more details about the nature and origin of your disagreement. However, Cousin It’s comment doesn’t seem too far off of what you said elsewhere (“Don’t stick your dick in crazy”). I would bet you would also drop a relationship where it seemed like you were always giving, and things didn’t seem fair and balanced.
Yes, that sounds about right. If you can win the dating game on your own terms, more power to you :-) It would be interesting to trace the origins of our incompatible priorities though. Everything is a consequence of something, right?
This question doesn’t make sense to me: if you are in a polyamorous relationship with someone who has two other partners, you have one partner who has two other partners. You don’t have “1/3 of a partner”. You also have the ability to find other partners, so you have “more” partners than you would if you were in a monogamous relationship with, say, a very busy person.
Whether this kind of relationship is better than none depends on how it goes for you: if your partner is helpful and supportive and you are ok with non-monogamy, then it probably is. I don’t see how this is a “bad deal” at all.
This depends on preference. I know for me that it is far worse than none. This is influenced by such factors as:
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners.
The importance of freedom (ie. the cost of being committed to a 1⁄3 deal.)
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet.
I personally would never go below 1:1 and I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire. There are far, far more people who settle for unhealthy ‘bad deals’ because of insecurities and false assumptions about scarcity of options (for them).
This claim gives an impression of being unfalsifiable. Any counter-example could be dismissed as the person being either insufficiently self-aware, insufficiently motivated to work towards a goal or not really desiring a 1:1 relationship. What kind of evidence would lead you to conclude that this is not as rare as you suggest?
Is insufficient self-awareness an impediment you think people could also overcome if willing to develop and work towards a goal or is it merely a convenient label for people who prove unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire?
I have seen people make similar claims in a way that is not falsifiable. That isn’t what I’m going for. Let’s see if I can make the terms a bit more concrete:
if that is their desire—Can only really go with self-reports on this one when trying to falsify.
self-aware Are able to notice that they have that desire? (Self reports again) Are they able to make observations about their beliefs, actions and the experiences that result from those actions. (Self reports). Only rudimentary self awareness is required. The process of developing social skills is extremely good at improving self awareness too.
Willing to personally develop—Will take actions and perform activities in order to change themselves. (External behavior which can be observed.)
work towards goals—As opposed to doing nothing. I don’t have any prediction about what happens when you do not take directed action. (Similar to the previous point.)
Rare—Let’s say < 1%. Obviously depends on the specific criteria used for the study.
A significant number of people dedicating 3 hours a day for 3 years to the goal of developing social skills and sexual attraction ability and not being able to form a relationship. With that much effort it is extremely improbable for someone without significant mental or physical disability to fail and it would be enough for even most people with moderate disabilities to have quite good odds.
Self awareness usually comes with time and maturity. You know, realizing how you act, etc. I include self awareness because obviously anyone who doesn’t realize (or admit to themselves) that they want to achieve a goal or notice what results they currently get will not even bother trying. The people you mention seem to already have plenty of self awareness. If they don’t then they are extremely lucky and someone else has input the relevant goal while they were on auto-pilot.
One more thought: Doing a lot of something doesn’t always make you better at it. There’s practice, and then there’s meaningful practice, and you need meaningful practice to get better, not just any practice.
For example, suppose you’re a poor writer and you’re trying to get better, so you set out to write more stories. However, after spending a lot of time writing, all that happens is that you’ve become better at writing poorly; you don’t suffer from writer’s block any more and can finish a story much more quickly than you used to, but each individual story isn’t much better than the ones you wrote before you practiced. What went wrong?
You’re the best chess player in your area, and you want to get better after getting trounced in a regional tournament. You play lots of chess games, and you rack up more and more wins against the people you always beat anyway. You then go to another regional tournament, and lose just as badly as you did before. What went wrong?
You’re the worst chess player in your area, and you want to get better. So you play a lot of chess games against your computer, but it seems that no matter what you do, you still lose, and you don’t seem to be any better at beating human players, either. What went wrong?
You want to be a better pianist, so you spend a lot of time practicing a number of songs on the piano until you’ve completely mastered them. This takes a long time. You then sit down to play a new song you’ve never played before and have a lot of trouble with it. It takes you just as long to master as all the others. What went wrong?
It’s pretty easy to practice something and never get any better, or only show improvement in a small part of a larger skill set.
You’re right, 3 hours a day practicing how to drop a piano on your toe will not help you learn to be a concert pianist, nor will 3 hours slamming the keyboard shut on your genitalia help improve your sex life. Between ‘self-awareness’, ‘willing to work’ and most particularly ‘willing to personally develop’ is the necessity to be willing and able to google ‘how to date’.
Or hire a dating coach, I guess.
Something like that, yes. Or look at what successful daters are doing and acting kinda like what they do instead of doing the opposite and failing for another three years.
I think you’re neglecting some possible failure modes. Unless you deny the existence of failures of the kind CronoDAS describes they don’t seem to be fully accounted for by your model. Why is it that some things that others find difficult we find relatively easy and others that others find easy we find relatively difficult? I think there is a bit more to the answer than means, motivation and effort.
I can think of examples of things I have accomplished relatively easy that many others seem to find difficult or impossible. I can also think of things that I have made some significant effort to become good at and have met with limited success and have ultimately abandoned. I think the reasons for success or failure when trying to develop some new ability are a little more complex than you seem to be implying.
My model is probably wrong. I am sure there are many people who cannot hope to get laid.
I guess I was hoping that on reflection you might be able to offer some advice intermediate between ‘it’s easy, google it’ and ‘it’s hopeless, give up now’. This is not a criticism—I know I am largely unable to offer any constructive advice on the things I am good at to people who would like to become good at them.
How about “it is really hard, google it”? ;)
Thanks for the clarification. Your criteria for judging if it is someone’s true desire, willingness to personally develop and for self-awareness are significantly weaker than I had anticipated. The time commitment is rather higher. That level of commitment seems likely to eliminate quite a few people as it is on the order of other goals that have a significant failure or drop out rate (completing a university degree, achieving and maintaining significant weight loss, mastering a musical instrument, sport or physical activity).
Your claim seems plausible with that level of time commitment but it seems to me that it gets into somewhat ambiguous territory. For skills that require that level of commitment to develop it is unclear to what extent ‘anyone’ can acquire them since intrinsic motivation and innate talent become hard to separate. It is not quite on the level of ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just learned to play the piano’ but it is somewhat similar. To what extent is failure to follow through with the commitment to acquire the skill a lack of talent or a lack of drive?
The level of commitment I list as minimum primarily an indication of how confident I am in making predictions regarding the success of individuals at 5 std deviations below the norm. If someone else has more familiarity with that class of people they would be able to specify a more realistic picture. I gave my criteria to demonstrate that such a claim is, in fact, falsifiable.
It is even more like: ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just spent 3 hours a day for 3 years practicing the piano’. (Except the piano thing is way harder.)
To add some perspective and as a belated reply to CronoDAS I would expect that anyone who could not get a relationship after spending 3 hours a day for 3 years trying and practicing would not be able to manage a full time job anyway.
Three hours a day for three years doesn’t seem compatible with having a full-time job.
I never said it was easy. ;)
If we’re talking about what it takes for me to have extremely high confidence that exceptions will rare then I need to be conservative. Most people need less but there are some, I’m quite sure, who do need to work extremely hard!
It is if (hypothetical generic) you have no ‘life’. The three hours a day could include one hour while commuting (studying, preparing and reviewing). All other social commitments that you have also count towards the three, assuming you do use them to develop and experiment with your social skills. Finally, I think it would be safe to relax the conditions of the ‘maximum required to expect rare exception’ such that the weekly average is 3h/d.
It is, but it is far from a trivial commitment. I, for example, wouldn’t bother spending so much time. Just wouldn’t care enough. But I am not a slow learner and even without explicit practice I could meet the minimum condition (“a simple relationship”). That is a fairly low bar, most people spending significant time could be expected to work towards a more specific kind of relationship with a partner ranking higher in their preferences.
It’s all about what you want. I would happily go below 1:1 (though generally things are more complicated than ratios), because the values of the factors you listed are very different for me than they seem to be for you.
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners: Moderate but not unduly burdensome.
The cost of being committed to a particular deal: Low. If the relationship is a net loss I would want to leave anyway, and if it isn’t then it doesn’t preclude me forming new ones.
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing: High. A shared partner is definitely better than no partner for my wellbeing, and a shared partner is even generally superior to an unshared partner, not least because of compersion.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual: None. If I have a need I can’t meet myself, allowing someone else to meet it is a pretty good deal, and even if they stop I’d be no worse off than before.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet: High. For the most part my relationship satisfaction doesn’t totally correlate with the amount of time I can spend with a partner, and whatever time is needed to maintain the relationship properly is usually enough to be reasonably satisfying.
Preferences should always determine lifestyle. I realize that our preferences are radically different, but that doesn’t mean that I and others like me are necessarily getting a “bad deal.” I suspect that if I were to take your approach it would make me miserable, but that is not a criticism of your approach.
It should be noted that the bulk of your point is an elaboration of what my answer to ChronoDAS was, yet presented as though it is is response to a position I do not hold, something which I have recently spent effort explaining to you. Whether this is explicitly intended or not it leads me to be increasingly wary of the nature of your comments.
I’ve been getting the impression from your comments that you broadly disapprove of people who have a different set of preferences from you in this domain (i.e., “suckers”). If this is a misunderstanding of your position I apologize.
The difference between insane and evil has meaning to me when people are not acting as enemies. When they are acting with social or political aggression the difference between selective comprehension and Machiavellian political influence can be considered one of ‘implementation detail’.
Once again an ancestor comment has not met my minimum criteria for ‘sane conversation’. This comment is at less than positive 3. Politics isn’t the mind killer, sex is the mind killer!
What argument or evidence would you require in order to believe that the people voting on that comment genuinely believe it to be of unacceptably low quality? I am not one such person (and I didn’t downvote it), but I have a relatively high tolerance for being insulted.
This community seems to frown upon unnecessarily hostile discourse, which strikes me as an entirely sane attitude, and the one of which you have run afoul.
… They do genuinely believe it to be low quality… The thing you want me to change my belief on is whether that is a sane judgement to be made by looking at that comment in contrast to the previous one. Sex is the mind killer.
Consider the question updated, then. What argument or evidence would you require to believe that judgment a sane one? Or, more generally, what would be necessary for you to believe that that comment deserves its current score, by your own criteria for “deserve”?
WrongBot, you have already made your epistemic and social political position entirely clear. These questions can be generated for any position held by anyone and me hearing them from you clearly provides me no new information. Trying to make others justify themselves is an effective social move anywhere and the phrasing you have used follows the correct script for this subculture. Yes, you may take some status, it would take someone of far more political ability than I to prevent that.
By way of approximate answer… it would be evidence strong enough to shatter everything I have learned of social dynamics and human thought patterns over the last 5 years.
I remain, as ever, largely indifferent to status. As I have done elsewhere, including in the original posting, I am asking these questions both because I am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes; I am trying to follow the golden rule and offering others opportunities that I would appreciate having offered to me. If you find my questions annoying or of little value, I will stop asking them.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
On the other hand, claiming to not be status-seeking (and honestly believing that too, of course) is a typical mode of status-seeking behavior, and this explanation of your claim seems orders of magnitude more plausible.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.
I’ve considered countering the argument for “deaf people” preemptively in the original comment, but thought it’s too obviously not applicable as analogy to the status thing to be actually used in a counter-argument. Silly me.
I won’t say that it’s completely impossible (though it might be) to lack status drives, but that it’s very improbable and would be a serious neurological condition.
Claiming to be deaf is best explained by being deaf in most situations; claiming to not seek status is best explained by a standard pattern in status-seeking present in most people. Besides, I’m not aware of status-breakdown as a known medical condition, which would make me see it as so much less probable, even if it’s known to experts. That there is still a chance for brain-damage being the cause doesn’t allow you to priviledge this particular hypothesis.
Schizoid personality disorder seems to be one possible way it could break down.
Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.
Details?
How sure are you that this is true of autistic brains?
Even if autistic folks were completely insensitive to status, that wouldn’t necessarily say much about status sensitivity not being basic/primitive.
People in a coma don’t think or even always breathe, yet I would say that thinking and breathing are built into the brain down to the primitive core.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
It would? I sure as heck wouldn’t say autistic folks ‘function successfully/efficiently/rationally’ in general, and much of the therapy and education I hear about strikes me as being in part teaching about status sensitivity. (My mildly autistic cousin spent a great deal of time on working on his acting out and misbehaviour and acting ‘appropriately’ - a codeword for status sensitivity if I’ve ever seen one.)
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
I saw this had been voted up to +1 and went to correct it. Then I noticed that it was me who had voted it up, I don’t know why. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, that comparison is idiotic. Why are you comparing autism to a coma? Why not compare it to, say, Triffids taking over the world. That is a bad thing too and only slightly less relevant. Your dismissal of the arguments is also unjustifiably absolute. There is a clear margin at the top of the ‘functional’ spectrum at which AS is personality trait that is far more adaptive in many ways than various other traits that we consider ‘normal’ despite being suboptimal adaptions to the current environment.
Deafness gives no benefit. AS does, even if they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
My apologies and downvote retracted; I made the unwarranted assumption that this conversation specifically included Asperger’s Syndrome under the Autism umbrella. I may have mixed it up with another thread.
In any case, you’re right. Classical autism is not a good thing.
np. There’s potentially an interesting discussion in Aspies and status sensitivity; are these people high functioning in the ways full-blown/classical autism is not except for social things like status sensitivity?
The biggest difference between Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism and full-blown Autism is IQ, ultimately.
Compared to neurotypical people, Aspies tend to have various social deficits, difficulty regulating emotion, a tendency to become preoccupied with narrow subjects and, less often, motor or sensory abnormalities. Along with lower IQ, full-blown autistics tend to have all of these symptoms (except possibly narrow-subject-preoccupation), and usually to a greater degree.
Agree and add that some of the serious undeniable deficits also vary by degree. An extremely high IQ aspie can also have crippling sensory integration problems while a lower IQ aspie may also have more mild problems to compensate for, leaving him ‘higher functioning’. Even those ‘various social deficits’ can differ in degree from ‘sufficiently below norm’ to irredeemably absent.
Agreed. It was not my intent to imply otherwise.
I wonder if using the word ‘and’ in the grandparent rather than the word ‘but’ would have better conveyed ‘elaboration’ rather than ‘correction’. I think so. Edited.
There is always some difficulty with executive function and attention control too.
Though since we do know that there are people who don’t properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.
That being said, I do agree that “they care about status, but don’t want to admit it / but don’t realize it” is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger’s considerably increases my credence their claim, though.
Data point: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. While I haven’t seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it’s at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.
I’m as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it’s as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.
If that counts as a “serious neurological condition,” then we may not disagree at all.
Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people’s actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?
Now that’s an interesting claim. I used to make it myself. What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status? Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status? Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior? How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
I could not possibly answer those questions with as much coherence as the question itself. Because that comment is a response to a trivial question and answers it with a one sentence reply then straightforward literal elaboration. In fact, if it did not take so much clicking I would remove every comment I have made on this thread except that one, leaving it as my poor, dead, canary. I still might. It is the kind of thing that appeals to me.
I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot’s claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
If you considered that a threat then I understand why you would disapprove. I did not consider it a threat because by my estimation it would actually be to WB’s benefit and my (externally visible) detriment. People doing out-of-norm things while you are in conflict with them tends to raise your status, even when those things aren’t really anything to do with you. It shows that you are able to affect them, you have some power.
Actually, if I did bother to redact a conversation it would be approximately for the opposite reasoning as a threat. It would remind me that I ultimately cannot change other people’s behavior but I do have the ability to choose what situations I am a part of. Just walk away. Not walk away to prove a point to someone else. People would disapprove of me if I deleted comments, an undesirable thing. It proves a point to me, changing the way I think and respond in the future.
What is the worst thing that can happen if I refuse to engage in what my brain perceives as evil, even in a direct, inelegant or dramatic fashion? Some people will disapprove of me, maybe even think I’m infantile. Without meaning disrespect (AdeleneDawner is someone whose judgement has impressed me), some transient disapproval is not nearly as important as a boost in self-awareness. As a general observation I find that if show myself how to avoid unacceptable things with direct action I find myself able to instinctively and effortlessly avoid them in the future. The opposite to learned helplessness. In a generalized form this is a strategy that is recommended by many personal development and psychological methodologies.
So, while I don’t seem to have chosen to remove my comments here it is something I consider a positive action and would be quite willing to allow myself to do in the future. That being the case, and since it is not possible for you to downvote deleted comments, I will make some comments here to give you the chance to express your outrage in those hypothetical future cases.
My disapproval of the threat of deleting the comments was not based on it being a threat toward WrongBot, it was based on my dislike of incomplete archives: I don’t want to see it become normal for people to delete comments that are part of a conversation, and since I can’t express my irritation at actual instances of that, reacting to instances of people saying that they’re considering deleting comments is the next best option. That said, your reason in this case seems sound enough to be a justifiable exception to that, though I would certainly disapprove if you were to delete this explanation at the same time as the other comments.
Parent and great-grand-parent upvoted.
I do understand your irritation and I will consider that as a factor if or when I happen to have an impulse to redact.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
OK, downvoted. I found this conversation difficult to follow with your redacted comments; it was very annoying.
While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
I don’t believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.
I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I’m aware it’s impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.
My sack of neurons isn’t very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.
Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.
That is shortest and the most explicitly circular argument I have ever seen.
You rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of your behavior on the grounds that you are not motivated by status, a belief you explain on the grounds that you are not presented with examples of your status-motivated behavior.
You could point to anything I’ve ever done or said and claim that I did it because I desired status. I rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of my behavior because I believe there is a better explanation. It is possible that I asked him the questions that I did because I wanted to score points; I don’t have access to the workings of my own brain. But crying “status!” is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
CronoDAS does not have an “h” in it.
(Sorry, pet peeve.)
Pardon me. I typed Chronos first but obviously didn’t correct it enough!
I think there are several people here who would disagree with you...
Anyway, being that I’m not as self-aware as many people here and am utterly terrified of anything that could be considered “work”, does that make me not a good candidate? :(
Yes, there are. There are many people elsewhere who would also disagree and many more people who once held that belief, no longer do and coincidentally happen to be far more successful in their romantic lives.
You have far more self-awareness than is required. But yes, the thing with work (combined with internalized shame) would make things difficult for you. Unless, you know, you want to change. ;)
Having been in that kind of position, I found that it’s less of a big deal than you think it is. There aren’t too many practical effects of one’s girlfriend having other boyfriends, given the right mindset. The only unavoidable consequence is that the maximum amount of time said girlfriend can spend with one is less than it might otherwise be. And that makes new boyfriends about as dangerous as new hobbies; that is, not very.
There have also been times when I was the one with the preponderance of partners, and while that was totally sweet, it didn’t have much to do with the partner imbalance. Having more good partners is just… better, regardless. For me, at least.
It is a little crude but this analogy holds best when the ‘hobby’ is collecting and mastering the use of sex toys. Being the one to meet needs for sexual satisfaction is a desirable thing, not least among the reasons for this is that involves you having more sex.
You would find 5:3 just as good as 1:3? Wow. I cannot imagine that; my instincts must be quite different to yours.
Mmm, not quite. I prefer to avoid group relationships where each person is directly involved with each other person; I wouldn’t mind if such a situation arose purely out of circumstance, but I dislike it as a deliberately engineered dynamic.
For me, the difference between dating three girls who were only dating me and three girls who were each themselves dating two or three other people is quite small. If anything, I might prefer the latter: being entirely responsible for providing emotional and romantic support for three different people is not easy. Not to mention that those other relationships would probably make the girls I was dating happier, which is a very desirable end all by itself.
I don’t know if you’ve ever dated a woman with a large toy collection, but I think it’s really more of a huge benefit than a disadvantage.
5:3 would be far more enjoyable in my experience from polyamoric relationships.
Assuming from your name that you are female or gender atypical do you mean 5males:3females or the reverse? (I cannot tell whether you went with mine:opposite or male:female.)
Don’t really care for the genders of partners. So any gender mix really. Female + bisexual with mostly female partners at the moment.
Lucky sod. :P
From context, it looks like you were using the notation (# of partners that my partner has):(# partners that I have).
What are your instincts? (Also, shouldn’t we write it x:y:z:3, since the 3 partners will each have different numbers of partners?)
Monogamy: High-appeal people date single high appeal people. Low-appeal people date single low-appeal people.
Polyamory: High-appeal people date multiple high appeal people. Low-appeal people date multiple low-appeal people. Sometimes, high-appeal people are willing to date slightly lower-appeal people because they wouldn’t have to break up with a high-appeal partner to do so.
I guess we are saying the same thing...
The Bell System monopolized telephone service in the U.S. because of the enormous cost (stringing wires to every customer) any competitor would incur to start to compete with it. (Later, U.S. regulators guaranteed its monopoly but imposed conditions on it, including if I am not mistaken the rates (“tarriffs”) it could charge, so let us restrict our attention to the earlier “unregulated” period.)
IBM monopolized the market for computers in the 1960s and early 1970s because of the largeness of the cost (e.g., retraining the programmers, operators and users employed by the customer) for the customer to switch to a different vendor.
Yes, since a large part of the benefit a man derives from a sexual relationship depends on the parties knowing each other really well, the time it takes for 2 lovers to get to know each other imposes a significant switching cost on the man and a significant cost on any woman who would try to compete with the initial woman, but the costs do not seem high enough (especially if the man already has female friends and coworkers) to warrant the use of the word “monopoly” and more importantly, the woman in the relationship faces costs just as high, so the strategic situation is much more symmetrical than it is between the Bell System and a consumer wanting telephone service.
So, “monopolist” is not a good choice of word, IMHO.
del