Of course, the most appropriate Žižekian point about this post is that ultimate super ego injunction is “Enjoy!” In other words, one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post. This ideal is the main message of consumerism in advertising—choose for yourself, unlock your deepest desires, express your true identity! If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can’t just settle for the boring default option—whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.
This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is “It’s none of your business!”
...one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post...
This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is “It’s none of your business!”
This sounds very defensive to me; you might wish to examine why that is the case.
To reply to your argument, which is really just guilt (of poly folks) by association (with conspicuous consumption):
(1) Non-monogamous people will experience a high social cost at present for admitting the fact. You can hardly compare them to “rebelling” consumers. Saying you want to choose a polyamorous sexual relationship is not analogous in social cost to buying $2,000 shoes, it’s analogous to buying a butt plug in front of your friends and family. It takes genuine mettle.
(2) Just because consumer culture emphasizes enjoying yourself, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy yourself (reversed cupidity is not eudaimonia). In the case of consumer goods, it means real reflection on what you actually enjoy, for how long, and what are the ethical implications? For sexuality, it means real reflection on what you want, what you already have, what is practical given human nature, ethical concerns, etc. All WrongBot is asking you to do is reflect on why you choose monogamy—publicly on LW, if the mood strikes you. Clearly it does not.
If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can’t just settle for the boring default option—whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.
Well, ceteris paribus, yes! Of course, ceteris are not paribus: there are other people and contingencies to take into account. But your enjoyment is morally considerable in and of itself, as well as in how it impacts others.
The logic of consumerism is to weigh all your choices and find out what you really enjoy. Isn’t the dominant value of mainstream culture unlimited choice, maximum freedom and flexibility, so that you can better enjoy? You bring up the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption account of consumerism, but that’s just dodging the issue, since that’s not how I’m characterizing it. This is not mere guilt by association—we could take any one of hundreds of TV commercials and re-edit them so they advocate polyamory in the exact same way as this post. The only change would be the name of the product. Could we do the same for a Mormon justification for polyamory? Not quite so easily.
When the author speaks about his personal benefits of polyamory: “I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous” Doesn’t this immediately evoke the Radiohead parody of stereotypical mainstream conformist consumption: “Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym...”
I notice how your counterargument is inconsistent with itself in trying to cover all possible bases—on one hand, you say that this argument for polyamory bears no resemblence to consumerism at all (on your mischaracterization of consumerism). But at the same time, you also say the exact opposite, it does conform to the logic of consumerism, but that’s not a bad thing! Perhaps you might want to examine why your own argument contradicts itself.
But ignoring that, let’s take your second point—what’s the problem with this logic of consumerism? You’re entitled to defend it if you like. But once you concede that, you undermine the implicit appeal of polyamory, which is that it’s something daring and subversive and nonconformist, which sounds very exciting! But this is plausible only if your idea of “the mainstream” and “the system” comes from bohemian and beat poet writings from 60 years ago. It’s quite astonishing that people who think of themselves as deep thinkers would make this kind of error, since we can safely assume that they are confronted with empirical evidence that they don’t live in the 1950s on a daily basis. Such is the appeal of self-congratulatory pseudo-rebellion.
No wonder that polyamorists can’t simply adopt their chosen lifestyle, it’s necessary to evangelize about it too. What’s the difference between traditional marriage and polyamory? It can’t be that polyamorists are able to form romantic and sexual relationships with more than one person, since traditional marriage has always tacitly tolerated this. The main difference is that polyamorists want to do this in the open, rather than in secret, which is to say that the difference is primarily that polyamorists want to be nonconformists. Therefore it’s not a stretch to say that the primary appeal of polyamory is a kind of erotic role-playing of nonconformity itself.
One further interesting fact about polyamory that always interests me is how it bills itself as a form of freedom compared to the constraints of monogamy. Naively you’d expect that polyamory entails simply sleeping with and forming romantic attachments with other people, but this is not the case! A quick glance at polyamory books and websites reveals that’s overrun with various rules and prohibitions about the proper way to do polyamory, not the least of which is “There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules.” A minor industry is devoted to publishing on a whole range of topics: the proper way to communicate in a relationship, how to deal with jealousy issues, what if you have children, what about STDs, how should you approach potential new partners, etc. etc. So we’re promised freedom, and we end up with an almost Kafka-esque nightmare of never-ending series of rules that we can never be sure we truly following correctly since every situation is different. In contrast, the traditional model of infidelity has historically had one very simple rule: be discreet. Aside from that, anything goes, including sexual acts that have been considered illegal: interracial sex, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.. To be absolutely clear, I’m not at all advocating this, I’m simply pointing out that the claim that polyamory is about freedom while monogamy is about constraints falls apart immediately on serious inspection. If anything, the opposite is true.
The logic of consumerism is to weigh all your choices and find out what you really enjoy.
What exactly are you proposing as an alternative to that process? Your whole post seems to be based on equating “explore all options and maximize” with “the logic of consumerism”, but while the former may well be necessary for the latter, it’s not even close to sufficient! To a large extent, that’s simply the logic of decision-making.
“Explore all options and maximize” is one approach to decision-making, but I think “explore what seems like enough options and either maximize or aim for good enough” are more common.
True. I guess my point was that it belongs down at the “logic of decision-making” level, and not at a level where “the logic of consumerism” should be relevant.
The main difference is that polyamorists want to do this in the open, rather than in secret, which is to say that the difference is primarily that polyamorists want to be nonconformists.
So, the desire to be honest can’t have anything to do with it?
Or are you convinced that the world is so fundamentally dishonest that honesty is innately equal to non-conformism?
If you’re looking for a one-size-fits-all set of rules, then polygamy—and, in fact, most forms of social interaction, including monogamy, if you’re interested in doing it well—is probably not for you.
The freedom that’s noted as a trait of polygamy isn’t the freedom from complexity (it’s complexity that leads to the “rules”), it’s the freedom to choose the kind of complexity you want to deal with, and how you’re going to deal with it.
So we’re promised freedom, and we end up with an almost Kafka-esque nightmare of never-ending series of rules that we can never be sure we truly following correctly since every situation is different. In contrast, the traditional model of infidelity has historically had one very simple rule: be discreet. Aside from that, anything goes, including sexual acts that have been considered illegal: interracial sex, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.. To be absolutely clear, I’m not at all advocating this, I’m simply pointing out that the claim that polyamory is about freedom while monogamy is about constraints falls apart immediately on serious inspection. If anything, the opposite is true.
I was initially going to respond “Constraints that you participated in the writing of and explicitly agreed to don’t go against the notion of freedom at all, certainly not compared to ones you have no say in and little choice to decline,” but it seems you’re coming at this from a rather different angle. You are considering the constraint of monogamy not as “be monogamous (details elsewhere)”, but rather as “be discreet about polygamy”. This has several problems, SFAICT.
We can apply this sort of level-jumping operation to any rule—“Do X” becomes “Be discreet about violations of X”—but these aren’t the same thing, and it is far from obvious that the latter is so. A real instance of the latter might be, for instance, how Spartan boys were taught to steal food—they were beaten if caught, because they were supposed to avoid getting caught. But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, “They did that?” rather than “They let themselves get caught?” or “They told people”, which suggests that most people have the simpler rule in mind. Or, even if they don’t, they certainly want to appear as if they did. Which either means they think most people have the simpler rule in mind, or the whole thing is one large mass hypocrisy in which everyone knows the actual rule is “be discreet”, but admitting this would be itself a violation of the rules. I suppose the latter isn’t too implausible, seeing that a number of things do seem to follow that pattern… but there will always be people, the “nerds” in Eliezer’s terminology, who actually believe what they’re told, and who won’t be in on it, and who actually will be using the basic rule. So even in the latter case I’m not sure you can claim that’s the actual rule. (In addition, in the latter case, the acknowledgement of the “be discreet” rule is unconscious, which doesn’t sound like what you’re describing above.) Though maybe I’ve missed a few cases?
OK. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is, once you’re acting within the bounds of “be discreet”… what are you actually going to do? You need more than one person for sex, and that (I should hope) means some sort of agreement about what’s actually going to go on. In short, we’re right back to square one—the freedom of “be discreet” is no different from the freedom of, well, open freedom, except that the former is hidden and the latter is not. Give people freedom to interact with each other, and they’ll want some sort of assurance of what other people will do, and will start making promises and contracts.
Problem number three is that it’s hard to see this as a solution when it’s fundamentally dishonest, but I guess that’s obvious.
Problem number four is that it’s arbitrary. You said the freedom is to “be discreet”. Be discreet about what? About violations of some rule. What rule? Does it matter? You’re talking about violations of monogamy, but your entire argument, if valid, would go through if that were replaced by polygny or any other rule. Your argument doesn’t support monogamy—it supports secrecy, and that’s all.
But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, “They did that?” rather than “They let themselves get caught?”
I think for many people, infidelity only can be said to have happened if someone was caught. This is the logic of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Another interesting aspect of outrage over rule-breaking is that it’s possible and even common to be openly outraged about a transgression that you don’t care about and even do yourself.
This is not really hypocrisy, it’s actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” Or maybe that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It’s even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it’s not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.
I’m not claiming that the actual rule is “Don’t get caught.” If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren’t ever naked, or that they don’t defecate, we know it’s just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the “restroom” (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don’t say it directly.
But this is not how the rule against infidelity works, which has to retain this dual character of official prohibition, supplemented by unofficial toleration. Another example might be the KKK—by day, good upstanding Christians, model citizens, etc., by night, raping, murdering thugs. Or military discipline which is supplemented by homo-erotic rituals, hazings, dirty jokes, and so on. Far from being a simple tribal bonding of no real consequences, military life could not exist without these hidden obscenities. If you remember the plot of A Few Good Men, when it revealed that a marine was murdered in the process of an extrajudicial punishment for breaking the unwritten rules. At the end, the Colonel on trial says “You can’t handle the truth!” The truth of those unwritten rules must be repressed. This is a case where those rules results in a much more serious punishment that simply violating the standard rules, in just the same way that you’d be shunned if you were revealed to be an atheist in a small provincial town in the South, but this would be nothing compared to what would happen to you if you crossed the KKK.
This is not really hypocrisy, it’s actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” Or maybe that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It’s even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it’s not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.
It is, as you say, the way belief often works; this doesn’t make it not hypocrisy, it just means humans are often hypocrites. (Though, I get the idea that the use of that term on LW and OB may differ a bit from the usual usage; here there does not seem to be any implication of conscious or deliberate hypocrisy. This may in fact just be a definitional dispute.)
I’m not claiming that the actual rule is “Don’t get caught.” If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren’t ever naked, or that they don’t defecate, we know it’s just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the “restroom” (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don’t say it directly.
This doesn’t seem to be analogous. People are explicit about the fact that the rules are “don’t go naked in public”, etc., and not “don’t go naked”. This is not the case with non-monogamy.
You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships. My goal here was to show that tacit prohibitions and rights have strong efficacy and should be considered part of the social order. This supports the idea that the tacit toleration of infidelity is part of the social order, and given the very high rates of marital infidelity, it’s reasonable to say that polyamory, in a certain sense, is already a widely accepted practice. This is intended to clarify the specific claims that polyamorists are making as well as in what sense it can be said to be a nonconformist lifestyle. This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.
Interesting that Sniffnoy observes that there will always be some people who take the rules too literally, the “nerds”, which is where we find the highest rates of polyamory (in the countercultural sense).
You continue to define polyamory in a way that is contrary to the established definition of the term.
You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships.
I do not. I claim that society generally prevents individuals from realizing that alternatives to monogamy as a standard for good relationships exist. Society very obviously does not prevent people from forming polyamorous relationships; you can tell because polyamorous relationships exist.
This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.
Again, I have not made this claim nor do I support it, not least because I am completely indifferent to questions of natural-ness.
A fruitful discussion on this topic is impossible if you continue to mischaracterize my position and refuse to even acknowledge that you are misusing words with clear definitions.
I continue to feel that the established definition is wrong, and I’ve made many points justifying that, none of which you’ve actually refuted. Instead, you simply insist that I restrict myself to your preferred definition. This is exactly my point—by defining the terms in advance and making them incontestable, you are trying to lead us to where you want us to go.
If you read carefully, you’ll see that I didn’t attribute the claim “monogamy is unnatural” to you. My point was to indicate the value of my observations about social norms and their relevance to general common claims about monogamy and polyamory.
Furthermore, you seem to be contradicting yourself. On one hand, you object to me deviating from the standard definition of polyamory, but also accuse me of mischaracterizing your viewpoints when I attempt to refute that definition. Do you or do you not subscribe to the standard definition of monogamy?
Definitions are neither correct or incorrect in and of themselves; they either reflect the way in which a word is used, or they do not.
I just asked google to define polyamory, and it gave me seven definitions, of which five are relevant; all but one heavily emphasize that polyamory requires knowledge and consent. If you can provide a link to any reputable source that defines polyamory in the way that you do, I’ll be happy to reopen this discussion.
I thought the major argument for polyamory was that some people are happier living that way.
Your first argument suggests that you find such arguments repulsive, but I can’t see why.
The major argument for polyamory isn’t that it’s subversive, though I’m sure some people get a kick out of that.
However, I don’t think polyamory is at all mainstream, even though it’s closer than it was in past decades. Note that none of those accused in political sex scandals have said that they had an non-monogamous agreement with their spouse, >2 marriages are used as a slippery slope argument against homosexual marriage, and afaik, the only popular fiction about polyamory presents it as very unusual.
I’d have upvoted the first paragraph by itself, except that the present application is a bit of a non sequitur. ISTM that one of these things is not like the others:
toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style
I’m not sure who’s standing to make money off of people switching from monogamy to polygamy, I haven’t seen paid advertisements for polygamy, and it seems to be more worth five minutes’ thought than does, say, choice of toilet paper.
P.S. Oh, and welcome to Less Wrong! I look forward to hearing your take on a number of other issues, as you appear to have a very different argumentative toolkit from the usual one here.
The issue I’m raising is that the logic of greater options and choices is the logic of consumerism. Renata Salecl has some interesting observations about this emphasis and how it generates anxieties and personal crises that directly challenge the ideological assumption that more choice can’t be bad. (See here: “Who Am I For Myself? Anxiety & the Tyranny of Choice: http://slought.org/content/11318/) As far as social critiques go, this is far more challenging to deal with than this post, which smugly & uncritically assumes that it stands outside of social norms. The truth is that society is not constituted by a single homogeneous set of norms which we can easily reject, but multiple conflicting and contradictory ones. Here, the norms of consumerism and choice come into conflict with the norms of marriage. Given what I’ve said about the tyranny of choice, the real challenge to our thinking would be to see this as an reason to reject polyamory. What if the main benefit of monogamy is that it provides relief from this tyranny? Sometimes you hear happily married people say that they are glad to not have to deal with the dating scene, which is a very interesting example of how the removal of choice is experienced as a benefit. A point I should make here is that the issue I have is definitely not with the practice of polyamory itself, but the stated rationale for it. It’s certainly possible to have non-consumerist justifications for polyamory—Mormon justifications, Muslim justifications, etc. The main problem I have is this uncritical assumption of the social norm that says more choice & fewer limitations is always better, particularly when it dresses itself up as nonconformity.
This ideal is particularly inappropriate applied to sexuality. The standard dictum that we can only truly enjoy ourselves once we get rid of all limitations should be reversed. Limitation is an inherent part of enjoyment, especially in the domain of sexuality. Why do we get erotic enjoyment from the sight of naked bodies but in tribal cultures where they walk around nude all day, they don’t? Nudity is only erotic if it is taboo and prohibited, which suggests that transgressing a prohibition is an essential part of sex. This explains the otherwise strange paradox of why mainstream society tacitly accepts infidelity so long as it’s discreet. Why not just make it official? The obvious conclusion: it would ruin all the fun. It’s well-known that the easiest way to make something attractive is to prohibit it which may explain why the rate of illegal drug use is higher in the US than in places with fewer prohibitions like the Netherlands. The mistake to avoid is thinking that the only purpose of the social regulation of sexual activity is to put a stop to enjoyment, and so it is therefore repressive. It is repressive, and that creates the moment of true erotic enjoyment, in the guilty or rebellious pleasure of having broken the rules. Thinking of society and social oppression as a consistent set of oppressive rules and regulations which we should try to reject misses the point. Ideology is at multiple levels, both in the rules and the ways in which we are solicited to break them, and the real social critique is not the cliche to always question the rules, question authority, etc. Rather, we should question the implicit rules of how we’re expected to break the rules.
So it’s very interesting how polyamory reverses the standard traditional relationship between law and transgression. The standard model is explicit official prohibition, but unofficial tacit acceptance of rule-breaking, which is then eroticized. Polyamory’s approach is officially about freedom—break free from the constraints of monogamy, etc—and unofficially filled with rules and prohibitions as I pointed out earlier, which we’re nonetheless assured aren’t really rules, only guidelines and suggestions, etc., which further attests to their secretive nature. Here we might find an example of how devotion to the law and the rules functions as a kind of obscene form of enjoyment in itself. In addition to the nonconformist polyamorist who gets an erotic thrill from freaking out the squares and is obsessed with what they think and how they are scandalized, there is also the conformist polyamorist who finds erotic enjoyment in the highly regulated and controlled lifestyle and in obedience to it’s secret rules and rituals. Maybe they unconsciously realize that standard monogamy model offers too many loopholes to violate the rules, they need them to be much stronger. We might also notice all the typical jokes about the wife as “a ball and chain”, keeping a man’s testicles in her purse, he’s whipped, etc., obvious references to BDSM practices. These jokes aren’t just incidental, they are part of the institution itself, even secretly integrated into its rituals, in the coded exchange of rings, an obvious symbolic representation of becoming a (sex) slave. The simplistic vision of standard marriage is that it’s very boring and vanilla, but what if it is a kind of kinky BDSM roleplaying?
I hope you don’t mind if I make some observations and suggestions about the form of communication you’re using, since there appears to be a little bit of culture clash at work right now. (I acknowledge up-front that a discussion of form isn’t a critique of content, and at any rate, I’m neither a practitioner nor an evangelist of polyamory myself.)
In a threaded conversation, brevity is the soul of communication: a few clearly stated points are much easier to reply to than a long essay. (Your first comment communicated much more clearly than the subsequent ones; it’s no coincidence that it was upvoted.) I completely understand the desire to expand more and more on a point in order to be more persuasive and less misunderstood, but in this format it’s usually much more effective to keep it short at first, then reply to specific questions and objections. (Here on the Internet, there’s much more of a tendency for people to gloss over long sections of text. You can mitigate this to some extent by bolding or italicizing the key points; clicking the “Help” link below the comment box tells you how to do this here.)
Second, the repeated “What If” questions stand out from the usual form of discourse. There’s a norm on Less Wrong (not universal, but common) of stating the actual reasons that cause you personally to hold a position, rather than tossing things out to see if anything sticks. (People do regularly play Devil’s Advocate, but even in this case they’re listing the reasons that would be most persuasive to them if not for their objections). I’d find it more helpful and interesting if you told us which of these considerations actually lead you to rule out polyamory as an option for you.
Again, this isn’t an indictment of your reasoning, just a note on what differences in mode of expression might be making this discussion less effective than it could be. (Reciprocally, please tell us if any specific aspects of Less Wrong writing style strike you as unnecessarily smug, uncritical, etc; that sort of input is extremely helpful to a community like ours, and we need to listen to newer voices to hear it.)
I appreciate the feedback. Once I respond to people’s objections, I’ll be on my way.
This is (obviously) your prerogative; however, I would ask that you give it a bit more time than that. I’ll just be blunt about why: you need LessWrong or something like it.
Okay, I know how annoying it is to be told about your own psychology by a stranger, but here goes. Your stated opinions, while extremely interesting and clearly well-educated, are of a form that makes it apparent you’re starting with a bottom line and working upwards to arguments. That is, in the particular case of polyamory, you seem to be starting with annoyance at polyamorists and, as orthonormal implied, throwing out plausible arguments to see what sticks. The ethic of this community is to use rationality to become right rather than prove ourselves right. We don’t always succeed at this, but we try.
Consider a thought experiment.
Think of all the hundreds of opinions you have on various issues and fact questions relating to science, public policy, economy, ethics, culture, sexuality, etc.
Realistically, you are dead wrong on at least one of those opinions (just like you know everybody else is). If you can’t accept that as likely, I give up.
But you don’t know which ones are wrong. Also, your brain is really terrible at telling you which ones, because it has dozens of (largely opaque) reasons for keeping its current beliefs. It only looks for confirmatory evidence. It likes stories better than statistics. It fears the social stigma of changing your mind. Perhaps worse than anything, the smarter you get, the better you get at rationalizing your bad ideas to yourself! I could go on, and on, and on...
Our community is pretty good at digging up those biases, exposing them to the light of day, and challenging you to question opinions previously held which might have been influenced by them. If you can do the same for others, the mutual benefit redounds to the favour of both.
So if you just want to convince people you’re right, you should indeed leave. If you want to try to be more right, stick around and keep talking. That is why I am here (I’m a relative newbie). I want to be right about all those issues. It’s an ethical question. And so far I have found nothing better than LW, for all its flaws.
I agree that we all need what you claim LessWrong wants to be, but I don’t think I’m retreating in any way from having my assumptions scrutinized. If anything, the problem is the opposite one, most the replies haven’t identified the key points on which my argument turns or their weaknesses, instead they’ve largely seized on what I think are irrelevant or incidental points, basic misunderstandings or just jumping to odd conclusions. I don’t think my arguments are insincere attempts to see what I can make stick, I intend to defend them as best as I can & I can’t even find an example of something that might be interpreted like that. But I respect the desire to keep this community free of disruptive elements, and concede the right of the members of the community to determine what that is and if it includes verbosity and inadequate formatting.
My purpose is not to prove myself right, but to help drive the debate to a less obvious and boring conclusion by calling into questioning some of the assumptions and the frame in which the problem of polyamory is posed. I think the post implicitly frames the problem in such a way as to unfairly tilt the playing field against those who disagree. But many of my comments have been down-voted without explanation, and the ease with which you can register your disagreement without having to confront the substance of what you disagree with (or do not understand), IMO goes against what you claim to be the purpose of this community.
many of my comments have been down-voted without explanation
At this time, your only comment with a negative score has 5 direct replies.
My purpose is not to prove myself right, but to help drive the debate to a less obvious and boring conclusion
I like interesting, aesthetically pleasing ideas. But ceteris paribus, the simplest ones are the ones most likely to be correct. Some of our communication difficulty may be a matter of phrasing—can you see why something like this:
the real challenge to our thinking would be to see this as an reason to reject polyamory.
makes it sound like you’re engaging in cognition motivated by something other than finding the truth?
can you see why something like this… makes it sound like you’re engaging in cognition motivated by something other than finding the truth?
Not at all. Are you suggesting I’m attempting to conceal the truth? I don’t know how this could be misconstrued, it seems perfectly straight-forward to me. The author suggests that polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms. I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis. I’m at a loss as to why this is considered out of bounds.
Polyamory can be the result of a thought process that challenges social norms. It can also be the result of a thought process that sees a good thing and then wants more of it. The process by which one arrives at polyamory does not invalidate the destination, even if the process is irrational.
I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis. I’m at a loss as to why this is considered out of bounds.
It’s not that your argument is out of bounds, precisely. It’s that you seem to be relying on a definition of polyamory that is the almost exact opposite of the one in common use.
Ethical non-monogamy doesn’t align with social norms in any modern, economically well-developed society. A challenging and interesting thesis is useless if it is contradicted by all available evidence.
Are you suggesting I’m attempting to conceal the truth?
No, khafra is suggesting that your cognition seems to be motivated by something other than finding the truth. Here’s a thought experiment that shows that does not imply that you’re attempting to conceal the truth:
Let’s suppose that I found out that by believing the world is flat, I could win $5. I might then attempt to perform cognitive operations which will result in my believing that the world is flat, that are ultimately motivated by the desire to win $5. It does not entail that anywhere in this process will I actively attempt to conceal the truth, especially to outside observers.
This statement:
the real challenge to our thinking would be to see this as an reason to reject polyamory
Seems to imply that you engaged in something like bottom-line reasoning, wherein one writes one’s conclusion on the bottom line of a proof and then tries to find justifications for the conclusion.
rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms
A red light came on at this one. Polyamory is overly conformist to social norms? Do you take it to be less controversial than monogamy? As far as I can see, monogamy is still the default expectation.
Seems to imply that you engaged in something like bottom-line reasoning
Oh, I see. The complete statement is that the claim is that polyamory is good because it offers more choice and flexibility. My response is that far from an advantage, this seems like a good reason to reject polyamory insofar as it is justified in that way. I’m contesting the pre-eminence of the value of flexibility in every area of life because I think they discourage deeper, more costly forms of connection in intimate relationships. In this area, I think inflexibility & limitation are virtues. I even claim that limitation in general plays a prominent, positive role in sexual enjoyment, so the specific limitation of having only one partner doesn’t necessarily prevent or inhibit enjoyment. Although I will readily concede here that it might for some.
If it can be shown that the absolute valorization of flexibility doesn’t inhibit deep intimacy, that intimacy has no value and there are no costs to inhibiting it, or that polyamory doesn’t valorize flexibility and therefore doesn’t inhibit intimacy, then I have no objection to it. A more minor issue is whether polyamory falsely posits itself as a nonconformist lifestyle when it is simply novel. Here, I claim that false forms of nonconformity retard social progress by promoting misconceptions about the nature of society, but this objection is about polyamorist discursive practices, not the actual practice of polyamory.
If I attempted to claim that polyamory is good at all in my original post, it was unintentional. In general, I would justify polyamory as good for some people because it makes those people happier than the other options available to them. For people who would be less happy if they were polyamorous, polyamory is a terrible idea.
Choice, then, is not good for its own sake, but rather because it offers opportunities for individuals to become happier. It is an instrumental value, not a terminal one.
A more minor issue is whether polyamory falsely posits itself as a nonconformist lifestyle when it is simply novel.
I’m quite curious: what do you mean by nonconformity?
The author suggests that polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms. I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis.
This has already been said, but I’d like to make it a little more explicit: Those are not opposites. “Polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms” and “Polyamory is overly conformist to social norms” would be opposites. But the whether “Polyamory is overly conformist to social norms” is true, is unrelated to whether it is challenging or interesting.
I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis.
Is this perhaps a miswording? Earlier, you seemed to be making the point that polyamory was purposefully nonconformist. It seems to me that perhaps what you’re trying to say is that polyamory depends on the existing social norms, as something to rebel against.
Assuming that’s what you were trying to say, I don’t see that as a good reason to avoid polyamory: If the theory is correct, then it seems to me that the largest number of people will be made happy by a dynamic equilibrium, where one generation (or group of generations) rebels by being polyamorous and the next rebels by being monogamous and then the cycle repeats. Why would that be objectionable? Or perhaps you’re trying to optimize for something other than happiness?
Ah, yes I guess I’m sliding between multiple definitions of nonconformity. When I said that polyamory is consciously nonconformist, I mean that in the sense that they adopt a position that is understood that way by their peers, their parents, etc. Nonconformity here is adopting idiosyncratic practices that may be stigmatized, with the intention of opening up new possibilities for living one’s life. When I say the opposite, that polyamory is overly conformist, I mean to challenge that idea—what is usually understood as nonconformity arrives at it’s position not by challenging social norms, but by rejecting the inconsistency of social norms. Where the monogamist has multiple conflicting and overlapping values of commitment and choice and freedom, etc., the polygamist arrives at her position by valorizing a single, unambiguous value and rejecting anything that conflicts with it. The most precise term for this is not nonconformity, it’s fundamentalism.
It’s certainly possible that a given social problem is caused by an inadequate commitment to a single value, but I want to clarify that this is the claim being made, and that I don’t agree, in two ways. First, I contest the idea that having a single unambiguous value to govern human social life is achievable or even desirable, and second, that intimate relationships are improved by introducing more flexibility and choice. I think we are very sensitive to the problems that are created by a lack of choice in relationships, and remarkably blind to the problems that are caused by too much choice. The post attempts to exploit this blindness by asking us rationally justify monogamy, a task that can only be accomplished by appealing to a set of values that are waning. In my view, the fact that we can’t do this convincingly is an apt illustration of the malaise that afflicts society.
...the polygamist arrives at her position by valorizing a single, unambiguous value and rejecting anything that conflicts with it.
Do you have evidence for this? It seems like a product of generalizing from one example, or some similar bias (correspondence bias, perhaps?), to me. I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t consider multiple conflicting values and determine that polygamy was the best way to satisfy most of them. (I will admit that a higher-than-usual chance that there’s a reason that I’m not aware of, since I’m rather unusual when it comes to how I think about relationships, but as the person making a claim, it’s still your responsibility to provide evidence for that claim.)
The post attempts to exploit this blindness by asking us rationally justify monogamy...
Hm.
I think this is the relevant quote:
This, then, is your exercise: spend five minutes thinking about why your choice of monogamy is preferable to all of the other inhabitants of relationship-style-space, for you.
I don’t know if WrongBot has read enough here to know this—if e hasn’t, you may be right about eir intentions—but in the context of what ‘preferable’ is used to mean here, that quote is not necessarily asking for a rational justification. Preferences are also strongly dependent on values—which are arational, not irrational—so it would be perfectly valid for someone to answer that question with something like “I value the security that I get from monogamous relationships” or “I value my status within my social group, which disapproves of polygamy”, with no further explanation necessary. “I value my time, and thus prefer not to spend it thinking about things like this”, which seems to be your objection, is also valid (though it would be a good idea to clearly specify what ‘like this’ means) - but, not everyone shares that value!
I’m male and I’ve read most of the sequences here, to clear up a couple pieces of uncertainty.
I was asking people to justify their preferences in terms of their values, so, yes, “I value the security that I get from monogamous relationships” is a perfectly valid justification, and there’s nothing irrational about it. Though I might ask for a clarification of what kind of security the person means (Social? Fear of abandonment?), and whether they’ve considered the ways that other kinds of relationships might provide or fail to provide that security. Why do you believe what you believe? That’s the ultimate question I’m asking.
I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t consider multiple conflicting values and determine that polygamy was the best way to satisfy most of them.
In principle, this is true, but I take the polyamory movement as having been heavily influenced by the 60s counterculture movement and the sexual revolution, influenced philosophically by Romantic poets and Rousseau. One of the major countercultural critiques of mainstream society is hypocritical, inconsistent and contradictory values.
Empirically, this has been demonstrated by Jonathan Haidt. Maybe you are already familiar with his work. He proposes 5 moral foundations—Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect, Purity/Sacredness—these are different ways of approaching moral questions. He shows that self-described liberals tend to value the first 2 far more than the last 3, where conservatives value them more equally. It’s fairly easy to identify the countercultural critique of society through these categories, by observing that they largely reject notions like respect for authority, religious justifications rooted in purity & sacredness, and loyalty to nation & family, taking these values to be vices rather than virtues and seeing all the evil in the world as a result of them.
Aside from that, the institution of marriage and monogamy is governed by the norms of permanent commitment and connection, admittedly less so than in previous eras. It’s difficult to see how an activist who rejects the culture’s major symbols and practices embodying commitment could not be intending to reject it wholesale, especially when the alternate values of flexibility are emphasized so heavily instead.
You seem to be making the argument that polyamory reminds you of a 60′s political movement and that therefore polyamorous people probably have the same intellectual values as leading thinkers in that movement. I find this nonsensical. I’m polyamorous, and I certainly wish that society in general would view polyamory as an acceptable alternative, but I’m not polyamorous in order to rebel against society, nor do I want to oppose the institution of marriage in any way. Nor do I have anything against commitment: quite to the contrary, I feel rather strongly that I need committed relationships in order to be happy.
So are you saying that I’m wrong to assert that the polyamory subculture has deep philosophical roots in counterculture? Or that those roots influence the presuppositions of people who consciously identify themselves with it?
I should also point out that as the 4th top contributor in a fairly diverse intellectual community outside of the polyamory community, your personal values and opinions are a poor counterexample.
So are you saying that I’m wrong to assert that the polyamory subculture has deep philosophical roots in counterculture? Or that those roots influence the presuppositions of people who consciously identify themselves with it?
I agree that a disproportionate fraction of the people practicing polyamory probably have values that are related to the ones you are discussing. But I don’t think there’s enough evidence to show that an overwhelming majority, or even a simple majority, of polyamorists would have the kinds of values you suggest they have. (The value of “opposing commitment”, in particular, seems very abnormal.) Possibly not even a remarkable minority.
In my experience people become polyamorous via a highly diverse set of routes, and affiliation with counterculture is just one of them. I’d expect there to be at least as many people who came to be polyamorous out of the simple realization that monoamory simply isn’t working for them than people who became polyamorous due to any particular counterculture ties.
I should also point out that as the 4th top contributor in a fairly diverse intellectual community outside of the polyamory community, your personal values and opinions are a poor counterexample.
I’m not sure what you mean. You were making a generalization about polyamorous people, and I gave a counterexample; I don’t know what me being the number four contributor on Less Wrong has to do with it. But if that makes me personally disqualified, I also have many polyamorous friends who are not part of this community and who most definitely also do not fit the profile you’re describing.
Ah-ha. You seem to be conflating polygamy-as-a-lifestyle with polygamy-as-a-political-movement. I know next to nothing about polygamy-as-a-political-movement, and don’t much care to—one can easily adopt polygamy-as-a-lifestyle without it, if that seems to be in one’s best interests.
Regarding the five values, polygamy-as-a-lifestyle seems to me to have the potential to be compatible with all of them, and in some ways it may do a better job of fulfilling one or more of them—including the latter three—depending on how you define the terms.
I’m polyromantic and asexual, and consider my current situation (two major partners and a handful of currently-important other relationships) to be very good in terms of all five, and better at care, respect, and purity/sacredness than most marriages that I’m aware of. (My concept of purity/sacredness is probably nonstandard, though.)
Aside from that, the institution of marriage and monogamy is governed by the norms of permanent commitment and connection, admittedly less so than in previous eras. It’s difficult to see how an activist who rejects the culture’s major symbols and practices embodying commitment could not be intending to reject it wholesale, especially when the alternate values of flexibility are emphasized so heavily instead.
You’re conflating monogamy, marriage, and commitment—and probably conflating sex with those, as well. This is somewhat understandable, since in this culture they’re strongly correlated, but it’s not very accurate in practice. Most kinds of poly relationships that I’m aware of—including mine—involve some kind of commitment; the fact that that commitment doesn’t necessarily take the form of a promise never to have sex with anyone else or an official document doesn’t make the commitment any less real.
One difference that I have with this community is that I take seriously the influence of social context, the history of ideas and the discursive practices that help determine our horizon of meaning. To me, drawing attention to social context in which an idea acquires meaning is not conflating issues, that is the issue. Ignoring or downplaying it means we’re trying to ignore the background in which certain problems become salient, acquire meaning and new choices become a possibilities. That’s just not reality.
I’m not merely pointing to the political movement, but the entire culture of polyamory. What are it’s values, shared beliefs, assumptions, norms, categories and justifications, and how does it posit itself relative to mainstream culture? The fact that you identify yourself as polyromantic probably means you have largely adopted that worldview. And here’s another area where I differ from the individualist bent of this community—even if you personally do not suffer from the ill effects of a particular idea, I claim that you have an ethical duty to consider the effects of promoting an idea if the influence of it’s philosophical presuppositions has a negative impact on society.
I want to point out that, at least so far, you haven’t disputed my contention that the poly subculture holds flexibility as the pre-eminent value, only that you personally don’t.
Ah-ha. You seem to be conflating polygamy-as-a-lifestyle with polygamy-as-a-political-movement. I know next to nothing about polygamy-as-a-political-movement, and don’t much care to—one can easily adopt polygamy-as-a-lifestyle without it, if that seems to be in one’s best interests.
One difference that I have with this community is that I take seriously the influence of social context, the history of ideas and the discursive practices that help determine our horizon of meaning. To me, drawing attention to social context in which an idea acquires meaning is not conflating issues, that is the issue. Ignoring or downplaying it means we’re trying to ignore the background in which certain problems become salient, acquire meaning and new choices become a possibilities. That’s just not reality.
Considering the second of the two to be much more important doesn’t make it not a conflation to collapse the first into it.
That’s a matter of your perspective. You assume that the concepts are ontologically separate to begin with, and are then collapsed, simply because in this case they are made conceptually distinct by being named differently. I disagree, I say the conceptual distinction is artificial, used to avoid the full scope of the issue by ruling certain facts a priori irrelevant without having to consider them.
If two concepts are separable, then considering them to be the same is “ruling certain facts a priori irrelevant”—specifically, whatever facts allow them to be separated. I do not see how it would be possible for the opposite to also be true.
Which facts do you think are being declared irrelevant in the process of looking at polygamy-as-a-lifestyle separately from polygamy-as-a-political-movement?
I don’t consider them to be the same, I think individuals and culture mutually influence each other and interact in complex ways. There are facts that are relevant to the debate that are being disallowed based on a preference for reductionist approaches that I don’t share. This preference wants to consider an individual’s motivations independently of the culture in which he or she is embedded. It’s incorrect to say that I disallow facts that would allow them to be treated separately, I have no problem with that. For example, if it can be shown that the cultural issues have no bearing on the issue. Given that questions about mainstream vs. subculture and conformity vs. nonconformity are deeply connected to this issue, I’m skeptical that this can be done, but I certainly have no objection to you trying.
The specific facts that I think are relevant is the polyamory culture’s connection to counterculture. Ignoring this influence means we’re debating whether polyamory could be logically justified, which is an abstract intellectual exercise that has little relevance to the question of how polyamory is actually justified. I assume that the rationale for this is that if polyamory can be shown to be logically justifiable, it doesn’t matter too much if one gets there by a different route; that it doesn’t matter if you are right for the wrong reasons. I disagree with that, I think it does matter.
The origin of an idea probably has a long term influence, but ideas also get changed as people use them. Not paying attention to the current state of an idea, or the movement which is using it means that you miss a lot.
I’m finding your comments harder and harder to parse. I’m not sure if this is a sign that I need to take a break and come back to this when I’m fresh, or a function of you being evasive, but either way, taking a break seems like a good idea. I’ll come back to this thread tomorrow.
He’s formulating his arguments in a paradigm foreign to this site, one that I would hesitantly identify as post-structuralist. I can mostly follow his arguments, but only because I thought I wanted to major in English in my freshman year of college.
The problem with post-structuralism and other similar paradigms, especially in the context of this site, is that it doesn’t seem to be terribly concerned with truth as rationalists define it; this makes it a particularly poor tool for discovering truth. Very good for circular arguments based on poorly-defined jargon, though.
Interesting. I find that his arguments are clear, but wrong.
I think I have a mental habit of thinking “what might this mean?” and coming up with something—generally something good enough that people think I understand them. It takes quite a bit to get me to think something is nonsense.
I respect the desire to keep this community free of disruptive elements, and concede the right of the members of the community to determine what that is and if it includes verbosity and inadequate formatting.
None of your comments have been downvoted to invisibility, and your total karma is non-negative. For someone so new, you’re actually not doing too badly. Others can chime in, of course, but I don’t see any reason for you not to stick around… unless you’re more interested in winning arguments than improving your rationality, that is.
...the nonconformist polyamorist who gets an erotic thrill from freaking out the squares and is obsessed with what they think and how they are scandalized...
While I suppose that there must be people who actually think like this, I myself have never met one.
this post, which smugly & uncritically assumes that it stands outside of social norms.
Is it smug and uncritical to point out the existence of a social norm? All I’ve done is to observe that the norm exists, (very briefly) describe alternatives, and ask “Why do you believe what you believe?” This doesn’t seem to be a question you’re interested in. While the paradox of choice is well-documented, it is not a linear function. Too much choice can be paralyzing, but we are happier when we can make important choices for ourselves.
It’s certainly possible to have non-consumerist justifications for polyamory—Mormon justifications, Muslim justifications, etc.
First, religion is a poor justification for anything. Second, the fact that polyamory is a choice does not mean that a preference for more choice justifies it; the question to be answered is still, “why choose polyamory?” One excellent reason is utilitarian: if polyamory is anticipated to make you and your loved ones happier than any alternative you’ve considered, why, you should choose it.
Choice is only helpful when it is possible to evaluate one’s options by some pre-existing metric. If I were to offer you three closed, unlabeled boxes, allowing you to choose which one to take does not improve your expected outcome.
I will try to sum up your position: you’re saying that
(1) limitation is inherently important to sex and romance;
(2) explicit prohibitions are often implicitly allowed to be violated;
(3) your problem is not with polyamoury per se, but with the fact that its proponents want explicit approval rather than mere legal toleration, which would
(4) provide too much choice (less choice is a relief for many monogamous couples) and undermine the sexiness-inducing nature of the prohibitions against it.
you’ve summarized a few of mike’s descriptive claims regarding ″how the world works″ and extrapolated mike’s probable values from those claims and how they were presented, but neither his hypotheses nor his (unstated) values have much to do with the ″thrust″ of his argument.
to paraphrase mike in the language of lesswrong: the original post is framed in such a way as to make readers think it is Obviously Obvious that being a conformist is ‘bad’ and being a non-conformist is ‘good’. Lesswrongers havent noticed because the Schelling Points offered up in the original post align very neatly with the pre-rational values Lesswrongers are most likely to have.
wrongbot’s post does not give us a reliable procedure for uncovering conflicting values. it does not tell us when we should invest time and energy trying to reconcile the conflicts we uncover. it does not tell us how to reconcile values when we decide it’s a good idea. it basically just says, ″here’s a social norm that may be constraining your behavior!” and implies (subtlely) that you should start ignoring it if you cant think of any clever reasons [that you can translate into words] why you shouldnt. how does that further the cause of Rationality?
Let’s look at why Wrongbot actually included the “Unknown Knowns” part. Was it an attempt to sneak in psychological influence in favour of his preferred sexual pattern or was it because he wasn’t secure in his right to post on this topic and was trying to justify it by framing it as a cognitive bias? I suspect the later. That reduces the ‘dark’ rating I give it considerably (but raised the ‘wussiness’ rating commensurately.)
I obviously have an interest in the answer to this question, so please keep that in mind.
Your latter suggestion as to my intentions is much closer to the truth (and you may be entirely right and I may be rationalizing). Because I’m so new to this community, I was certainly trying to avoid posting something that looked inappropriate. This is a specific issue that I think rationalists should consider regardless of framing, and I won’t deny that to that end I attempted to present it in the best light possible.
The choice of frame wasn’t arbitrary, though. My writing process for the post basically involved explaining why considering alternatives to monogamy was a good idea, and then noticing that relationship style was an example of a broader problem which I hadn’t seen described on LessWrong, and that this observation would bring the post more in line with other content I’d seen on the site. Then I went through about five more drafts and hit submit.
I honestly believe that conformity is orthogonal to truth; that other people believe something makes it no more or less true (though it may provide evidence as to the thing’s truth, if those other people are particularly trustworthy or untrustworthy). The comments above and elsewhere indicate that I was not sufficiently clear in communicating that in my original post, and I would be grateful to anyone who suggested how I could have been more clear.
Insulting or not, you had a point. And I try very hard to appreciate well-intentioned criticism, so don’t worry about it.
Ahh, I think I have conveyed that I would be reluctant to give insult, which isn’t the case. Insulting people is something that is gives negative terminal value in my preferences but it is something I am comfortable with as an instrumental means. It happens to be the case that you have the maturity to handle criticism, you do not have an emotional vulnerability there. Curiously, I would be more inclined to make a call of ‘wussiness!’ if I did think that you had an insecurity there, a button that could be pushed. That would be exactly the case where such stimulus would provoke the most positive influence. The reaction to having that button pushed simultaneously strengthens against the vulnerability to criticism and causes a confrontation of and improvement in the trait they are insecure about.
Pardon the tangent into abstract observations on human behavior and development processes. The subject fascinates me.
Negative? *blink* That possibility didn’t even occur to me. I thought the descriptive component rather obvious and the normative component neutral (commensurate transfer of any ‘negative’ component from one label to another.) Curious.
Now, I know with some confidence that calling out ‘wussiness’ is extremely effective in discouraging future examples. I am almost as confident that this applies even if me making the call is met with disapproval. I have collected a significant sample of cases of calling things wussy (or context appropriate alternatives) with intended positive influence.
With no replies except mine (as of this edit) I can delete my comment without losing face. The question I must ask myself is whether I am willing to potentially sacrifice status in order to make this influence. That question is easy, which gives a strong signal of the degree to which I consider ‘wussiness’ my enemy!
Now, I know with some confidence that calling out ‘wussiness’ is extremely effective in discouraging future examples.
I’m a little confused. What is it you’re trying to discourage? People framing posts in terms of cognitive biases? This seems like something we’d want, and in fact I suggested that WrongBot frame the post in a more general way.
(1) WrongBot’s post assumes unjustifiably that non-conformity is obviously a good thing;
(2) monogamy is tied up intimately with human terminal values—values that are not well-addressed by the post and may even make rational justifications of monogamy superfluous;
(3) the demand for justification (or, failing that, rejection) of a social norm is somehow unfair or hasty, or again assumes non-conformity must be a good thing.
(1) Yes, but also I claim that WrongBot’s claim of nonconformity is simply false. He’s just applying a very widely held value in a slightly novel way.
(2) I think monogamy can be justified rationally, but this involves reconstructing certain values that have been eclipsed by consumerist logic
(3) The demand to justify our sexual practices or risk being put into stigmatized position of conformist is unfair.
Some further points: the debate of polyamory vs. monogamy is not, strictly speaking, a debate about whether it’s best to have one partner or multiple partners. It is partly about whether society should stigmatize the open deviation from the norm, but that is not the thrust of the argument here. There’s a stronger claim lurking here, that many people consider maximum choice and flexibility the royal road to happiness and since polyamory more adequately embodies this ideal, it is superior to monogamy, at least for those people. Once people examine their beliefs in the cold light of reason, they will choose what works for them, etc.
Upvoted for being a good & concise distillation of your concerns.
(2) I think monogamy can be justified rationally, but this involves reconstructing certain values that have been eclipsed by consumerist logic
Which values would these be, and what do you mean by reconstructing them? I’m listening.
(3) The demand to justify our sexual practices or risk being put into stigmatized position of conformist is unfair.
Well, as someone said to you above, I don’t think WrongBot’s intention was to stigmatize anyone. You could have simply said “I personally find polyamory icky” and that would have been considered a perfectly valid ‘justification.’ I understood him to be saying merely: here is an opportunity to reflect on this norm—I personally found my rejection of it to be a net positive in my life.
There’s a stronger claim lurking here, that many people consider maximum choice and flexibility the royal road to happiness and since polyamory more adequately embodies this ideal, it is superior to monogamy, at least for those people.
This is, IMO, your most interesting and defensible claim. It is certainly plausible that some or many modern Westerners and polyamorists are fetishizing “variety of choice” in their decisions, in the naive belief that greater choice leads to greater happiness. However, what is the right way of making such decisions then?
Once people examine their beliefs in the cold light of reason, they will choose what works for them, etc.
I suspect you’re defining “reason” too narrowly. For me, the ‘reasonable decision’ is basically by definition the best decision, given a thorough weighing of all potential factors that could come into play—including whatever objections to polyamory and arguments for monogamy you might have! Moreover, reason’s light is not cold, since before it can even get off the ground, it needs to know our warm and fluffy terminal values. When you think of reason, think “All Things Considered,” don’t think “Spock.”
I’ll repeat something I alluded to before: a happily married woman who listens to her sister’s dramatic dating stories and feels relief that she no longer has to worry about all that. This is an example of how removing choice and flexibility can be the source of happiness. This requires us to see choice in negative terms, which is actually quite difficult to do, because the problems of a lack of choice have been dramatized in movies and novels so often that we have a strong emotional resonance with them—for example, the familiar narrative of the son who is forced into the family business by an overbearing father, deprived of his opportunity to explore and pursue his dreams. The plot of the movie Ratatouille is something like this. We know intellectually that problems of too much choice exist, of course, but strong cultural narratives have deformed our cognition such that they appear insignificant to us. Just noticing and critiquing these values when they appear is a very useful thing to do.
One good example of this is a recent book called Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. The thesis is that women have extremely high expectations for potential husbands, to the point that they reject perfectly good men in the hopes that something better will come along. Eventually their options dwindle and they find themselves childless and unmarried in their 40s, which was the experience of the author. The problem here is buyer’s remorse. Given the wealth of options as well as the emphasis on getting the very best for yourself, this translates into a need for flexibility: form less secure, more temporary relationships until you find the one that gives you everything you want. I don’t really know what an improved decision-making process would be exactly, but the fact that our gut reaction to the title “Settle for Mr. Good Enough” is that this sounds patently absurd is a good gauge for our thinking. When this seems like wisdom rather than absurdity, we will know we have made progress. Having said that, I think the book is flawed because it doesn’t go far enough in it’s critique which forces the author to compromise the thesis.
Polyamory might posit itself as a solution to this problem of excess choice, diagnosing this situation as a problem of inflexibility within the social obligation to choose one person. If one person doesn’t have everything you need, you should find someone else who does, but why not have both of them? So polyamory addresses the problem of excess choice with still more flexiblity and choice, which in turn generates more crises which are then addressed by the proliferation of rules. To me, this points to the general unsustainability of flexibility as a single guiding norm, and also the undesirability of polyamory itself—in order to sustain this “freedom”, excessive regulation is required. This last point is of course a personal judgment; if others prefer heavily regulated sex lives, I have no reason to prevent them.
There’s a kind of knee-jerk analysis that happens: we see a difficult situation, and conclude that the ultimate problem is a lack of flexibility: things that are easy to change are always good, and things that are hard to change are always bad. Politically, this translate into support for right-wing economic policies, which are ideologically rendered as more flexible than the restrictive constraints of government action, and therefore preferable. And yes, I am aware that I am drawing another counterintuitive connection, between right-wing economic policies and left-wing sex politics, but I think there are unconscious shared assumptions underlying much countercultural politics that posits itself as radical, left-wing, etc.
I disagree with the first sentence. Since my disagreement hinges on the difference between partial and total derivatives I hope it is broadly interesting.
When Milton Friedman titled one of his books Free To Chose his underlying model was that happyness was a function both of the number of choices and the quality of the choices:
). His theory is that q is a dependent variable:
). When choices, c, are few, then producers offer consumers poor choices, on a take-it or leave-it basis. When choices are many, producers compete and consumers are offered good choices.frac{dq}{dc} is positive and large.frac{partialh}{partialq} is positive and large. What of frac{partialh}{partialc}? Presumably it is negative, all that comparison shopping is a chore, but in this analysis it is seen as small. Choice is good,meaning
I see the consumerist position, that choice is good, meaning frac{partialh}{partialc}>0, as a crude vulgarisation of the argument above.
Trying to apply this to a 30 year old American contemplating polyamory, my assumption is that he has experience of how the inner dynamics of the modern American monogamous romance play out. Unhappy experience. Now he is wondering about the dynamics implicit in polyamory. He wants to know whether changing the rules produces a better game, and he knows that he cannot find out via the simple equation: more choice = better. He must consider how the players respond to the changed incentives produced by the new rules.
I disagree with the first sentence. Since my disagreement hinges on the difference between partial and total derivatives I hope it is broadly interesting.
If q is a function of c, then h becomes a function of one independent variable, and your use of partials here doesn’t make sense, because you can’t hold c constant while changing q or vice versa.
You are making me feel old. My notation was orthodox in 1958. Indeed, in A Course Of Pure Mathematics, Tenth Edition, section 157, Hardy writes:
The distinction between the two functions is adequately shown by denoting the first by frac{df}{dx} and the second by frac{partialf}{partialx}, in which case the theorem takes the form frac{df}{dx}=frac{partialf}{partialx}frac{partialf}{partialy}frac{dy}{dx}; though this notation is also open to objection, in that it is a little misleading to denote the functions
\}) and
) whose forms as functions of x are quite different from one another, by the same letter f in frac{df}{dx} and frac{partialf}{partialx}.
I think your notation is still orthodox, or at least fairly common, nowadays. Wikipedia uses it on its total derivative page, for example, and it seems familiar to me.
If q is a function of c, then h becomes a function of one independent variable, and your use of partials here doesn’t make sense, because you can’t hold c constant while changing q or vice versa.
I thought that this was the kind of situation partial derivatives are there for. AlanCrowe’s just applied the multivariable chain rule, if I’m getting it right.
Thinking of society and social oppression as a consistent set of oppressive rules and regulations which we should try to reject misses the point. Ideology is at multiple levels, both in the rules and the ways in which we are solicited to break them, and the real social critique is not the cliche to always question the rules, question authority, etc. Rather, we should question the implicit rules of how we’re expected to break the rules.
This is actually an interesting point; however, sometimes it really is about the rules. Homosexuality was not illegal because that made it even sexier.
In addition to the nonconformist polyamorist who gets an erotic thrill from freaking out the squares and is obsessed with what they think and how they are scandalized, there is also the conformist polyamorist who finds erotic enjoyment in the highly regulated and controlled lifestyle and in obedience to it’s secret rules and rituals.
I think you have to pick one. Either polyamorists are misguided because they’re out to piss off the bourgeoisie with their nonconformity, or they’re misguided because they’re actually rule-bound conformists themselves. (Or they’re hypocrites, but that describes damn near everyone anyway.)
So the correct response to a suggestion that you think is: “It’s none of your business!”?
I thought Lesswrong was all about thinking, and becoming less wrong.
The OP didn’t demand you explain yourself, merely suggested you ought to consider why you believe what you believe.
Seems a reasonable suggestion to me.
Of course, the most appropriate Žižekian point about this post is that ultimate super ego injunction is “Enjoy!” In other words, one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post. This ideal is the main message of consumerism in advertising—choose for yourself, unlock your deepest desires, express your true identity! If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can’t just settle for the boring default option—whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.
This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is “It’s none of your business!”
This sounds very defensive to me; you might wish to examine why that is the case.
To reply to your argument, which is really just guilt (of poly folks) by association (with conspicuous consumption):
(1) Non-monogamous people will experience a high social cost at present for admitting the fact. You can hardly compare them to “rebelling” consumers. Saying you want to choose a polyamorous sexual relationship is not analogous in social cost to buying $2,000 shoes, it’s analogous to buying a butt plug in front of your friends and family. It takes genuine mettle.
(2) Just because consumer culture emphasizes enjoying yourself, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy yourself (reversed cupidity is not eudaimonia). In the case of consumer goods, it means real reflection on what you actually enjoy, for how long, and what are the ethical implications? For sexuality, it means real reflection on what you want, what you already have, what is practical given human nature, ethical concerns, etc. All WrongBot is asking you to do is reflect on why you choose monogamy—publicly on LW, if the mood strikes you. Clearly it does not.
Well, ceteris paribus, yes! Of course, ceteris are not paribus: there are other people and contingencies to take into account. But your enjoyment is morally considerable in and of itself, as well as in how it impacts others.
I nearly missed this in the middle of that dense paragraph so it is worth a quote!
The logic of consumerism is to weigh all your choices and find out what you really enjoy. Isn’t the dominant value of mainstream culture unlimited choice, maximum freedom and flexibility, so that you can better enjoy? You bring up the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption account of consumerism, but that’s just dodging the issue, since that’s not how I’m characterizing it. This is not mere guilt by association—we could take any one of hundreds of TV commercials and re-edit them so they advocate polyamory in the exact same way as this post. The only change would be the name of the product. Could we do the same for a Mormon justification for polyamory? Not quite so easily.
When the author speaks about his personal benefits of polyamory: “I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous” Doesn’t this immediately evoke the Radiohead parody of stereotypical mainstream conformist consumption: “Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym...”
I notice how your counterargument is inconsistent with itself in trying to cover all possible bases—on one hand, you say that this argument for polyamory bears no resemblence to consumerism at all (on your mischaracterization of consumerism). But at the same time, you also say the exact opposite, it does conform to the logic of consumerism, but that’s not a bad thing! Perhaps you might want to examine why your own argument contradicts itself.
But ignoring that, let’s take your second point—what’s the problem with this logic of consumerism? You’re entitled to defend it if you like. But once you concede that, you undermine the implicit appeal of polyamory, which is that it’s something daring and subversive and nonconformist, which sounds very exciting! But this is plausible only if your idea of “the mainstream” and “the system” comes from bohemian and beat poet writings from 60 years ago. It’s quite astonishing that people who think of themselves as deep thinkers would make this kind of error, since we can safely assume that they are confronted with empirical evidence that they don’t live in the 1950s on a daily basis. Such is the appeal of self-congratulatory pseudo-rebellion.
No wonder that polyamorists can’t simply adopt their chosen lifestyle, it’s necessary to evangelize about it too. What’s the difference between traditional marriage and polyamory? It can’t be that polyamorists are able to form romantic and sexual relationships with more than one person, since traditional marriage has always tacitly tolerated this. The main difference is that polyamorists want to do this in the open, rather than in secret, which is to say that the difference is primarily that polyamorists want to be nonconformists. Therefore it’s not a stretch to say that the primary appeal of polyamory is a kind of erotic role-playing of nonconformity itself.
One further interesting fact about polyamory that always interests me is how it bills itself as a form of freedom compared to the constraints of monogamy. Naively you’d expect that polyamory entails simply sleeping with and forming romantic attachments with other people, but this is not the case! A quick glance at polyamory books and websites reveals that’s overrun with various rules and prohibitions about the proper way to do polyamory, not the least of which is “There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules.” A minor industry is devoted to publishing on a whole range of topics: the proper way to communicate in a relationship, how to deal with jealousy issues, what if you have children, what about STDs, how should you approach potential new partners, etc. etc. So we’re promised freedom, and we end up with an almost Kafka-esque nightmare of never-ending series of rules that we can never be sure we truly following correctly since every situation is different. In contrast, the traditional model of infidelity has historically had one very simple rule: be discreet. Aside from that, anything goes, including sexual acts that have been considered illegal: interracial sex, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.. To be absolutely clear, I’m not at all advocating this, I’m simply pointing out that the claim that polyamory is about freedom while monogamy is about constraints falls apart immediately on serious inspection. If anything, the opposite is true.
What exactly are you proposing as an alternative to that process? Your whole post seems to be based on equating “explore all options and maximize” with “the logic of consumerism”, but while the former may well be necessary for the latter, it’s not even close to sufficient! To a large extent, that’s simply the logic of decision-making.
“Explore all options and maximize” is one approach to decision-making, but I think “explore what seems like enough options and either maximize or aim for good enough” are more common.
True. I guess my point was that it belongs down at the “logic of decision-making” level, and not at a level where “the logic of consumerism” should be relevant.
So, the desire to be honest can’t have anything to do with it?
Or are you convinced that the world is so fundamentally dishonest that honesty is innately equal to non-conformism?
If you’re looking for a one-size-fits-all set of rules, then polygamy—and, in fact, most forms of social interaction, including monogamy, if you’re interested in doing it well—is probably not for you.
The freedom that’s noted as a trait of polygamy isn’t the freedom from complexity (it’s complexity that leads to the “rules”), it’s the freedom to choose the kind of complexity you want to deal with, and how you’re going to deal with it.
I was initially going to respond “Constraints that you participated in the writing of and explicitly agreed to don’t go against the notion of freedom at all, certainly not compared to ones you have no say in and little choice to decline,” but it seems you’re coming at this from a rather different angle. You are considering the constraint of monogamy not as “be monogamous (details elsewhere)”, but rather as “be discreet about polygamy”. This has several problems, SFAICT.
We can apply this sort of level-jumping operation to any rule—“Do X” becomes “Be discreet about violations of X”—but these aren’t the same thing, and it is far from obvious that the latter is so. A real instance of the latter might be, for instance, how Spartan boys were taught to steal food—they were beaten if caught, because they were supposed to avoid getting caught. But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, “They did that?” rather than “They let themselves get caught?” or “They told people”, which suggests that most people have the simpler rule in mind. Or, even if they don’t, they certainly want to appear as if they did. Which either means they think most people have the simpler rule in mind, or the whole thing is one large mass hypocrisy in which everyone knows the actual rule is “be discreet”, but admitting this would be itself a violation of the rules. I suppose the latter isn’t too implausible, seeing that a number of things do seem to follow that pattern… but there will always be people, the “nerds” in Eliezer’s terminology, who actually believe what they’re told, and who won’t be in on it, and who actually will be using the basic rule. So even in the latter case I’m not sure you can claim that’s the actual rule. (In addition, in the latter case, the acknowledgement of the “be discreet” rule is unconscious, which doesn’t sound like what you’re describing above.) Though maybe I’ve missed a few cases?
OK. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is, once you’re acting within the bounds of “be discreet”… what are you actually going to do? You need more than one person for sex, and that (I should hope) means some sort of agreement about what’s actually going to go on. In short, we’re right back to square one—the freedom of “be discreet” is no different from the freedom of, well, open freedom, except that the former is hidden and the latter is not. Give people freedom to interact with each other, and they’ll want some sort of assurance of what other people will do, and will start making promises and contracts.
Problem number three is that it’s hard to see this as a solution when it’s fundamentally dishonest, but I guess that’s obvious.
Problem number four is that it’s arbitrary. You said the freedom is to “be discreet”. Be discreet about what? About violations of some rule. What rule? Does it matter? You’re talking about violations of monogamy, but your entire argument, if valid, would go through if that were replaced by polygny or any other rule. Your argument doesn’t support monogamy—it supports secrecy, and that’s all.
I think for many people, infidelity only can be said to have happened if someone was caught. This is the logic of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Another interesting aspect of outrage over rule-breaking is that it’s possible and even common to be openly outraged about a transgression that you don’t care about and even do yourself.
This is not really hypocrisy, it’s actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” Or maybe that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It’s even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it’s not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.
I’m not claiming that the actual rule is “Don’t get caught.” If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren’t ever naked, or that they don’t defecate, we know it’s just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the “restroom” (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don’t say it directly.
But this is not how the rule against infidelity works, which has to retain this dual character of official prohibition, supplemented by unofficial toleration. Another example might be the KKK—by day, good upstanding Christians, model citizens, etc., by night, raping, murdering thugs. Or military discipline which is supplemented by homo-erotic rituals, hazings, dirty jokes, and so on. Far from being a simple tribal bonding of no real consequences, military life could not exist without these hidden obscenities. If you remember the plot of A Few Good Men, when it revealed that a marine was murdered in the process of an extrajudicial punishment for breaking the unwritten rules. At the end, the Colonel on trial says “You can’t handle the truth!” The truth of those unwritten rules must be repressed. This is a case where those rules results in a much more serious punishment that simply violating the standard rules, in just the same way that you’d be shunned if you were revealed to be an atheist in a small provincial town in the South, but this would be nothing compared to what would happen to you if you crossed the KKK.
It is, as you say, the way belief often works; this doesn’t make it not hypocrisy, it just means humans are often hypocrites. (Though, I get the idea that the use of that term on LW and OB may differ a bit from the usual usage; here there does not seem to be any implication of conscious or deliberate hypocrisy. This may in fact just be a definitional dispute.)
This doesn’t seem to be analogous. People are explicit about the fact that the rules are “don’t go naked in public”, etc., and not “don’t go naked”. This is not the case with non-monogamy.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that monogamy is much like the KKK and also that monogamy is good.
Do you believe that knowing the truth is valuable?
You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships. My goal here was to show that tacit prohibitions and rights have strong efficacy and should be considered part of the social order. This supports the idea that the tacit toleration of infidelity is part of the social order, and given the very high rates of marital infidelity, it’s reasonable to say that polyamory, in a certain sense, is already a widely accepted practice. This is intended to clarify the specific claims that polyamorists are making as well as in what sense it can be said to be a nonconformist lifestyle. This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.
Interesting that Sniffnoy observes that there will always be some people who take the rules too literally, the “nerds”, which is where we find the highest rates of polyamory (in the countercultural sense).
You continue to define polyamory in a way that is contrary to the established definition of the term.
I do not. I claim that society generally prevents individuals from realizing that alternatives to monogamy as a standard for good relationships exist. Society very obviously does not prevent people from forming polyamorous relationships; you can tell because polyamorous relationships exist.
Again, I have not made this claim nor do I support it, not least because I am completely indifferent to questions of natural-ness.
A fruitful discussion on this topic is impossible if you continue to mischaracterize my position and refuse to even acknowledge that you are misusing words with clear definitions.
I continue to feel that the established definition is wrong, and I’ve made many points justifying that, none of which you’ve actually refuted. Instead, you simply insist that I restrict myself to your preferred definition. This is exactly my point—by defining the terms in advance and making them incontestable, you are trying to lead us to where you want us to go.
If you read carefully, you’ll see that I didn’t attribute the claim “monogamy is unnatural” to you. My point was to indicate the value of my observations about social norms and their relevance to general common claims about monogamy and polyamory.
Furthermore, you seem to be contradicting yourself. On one hand, you object to me deviating from the standard definition of polyamory, but also accuse me of mischaracterizing your viewpoints when I attempt to refute that definition. Do you or do you not subscribe to the standard definition of monogamy?
Definitions are neither correct or incorrect in and of themselves; they either reflect the way in which a word is used, or they do not.
I just asked google to define polyamory, and it gave me seven definitions, of which five are relevant; all but one heavily emphasize that polyamory requires knowledge and consent. If you can provide a link to any reputable source that defines polyamory in the way that you do, I’ll be happy to reopen this discussion.
I thought the major argument for polyamory was that some people are happier living that way.
Your first argument suggests that you find such arguments repulsive, but I can’t see why.
The major argument for polyamory isn’t that it’s subversive, though I’m sure some people get a kick out of that.
However, I don’t think polyamory is at all mainstream, even though it’s closer than it was in past decades. Note that none of those accused in political sex scandals have said that they had an non-monogamous agreement with their spouse, >2 marriages are used as a slippery slope argument against homosexual marriage, and afaik, the only popular fiction about polyamory presents it as very unusual.
I’d have upvoted the first paragraph by itself, except that the present application is a bit of a non sequitur. ISTM that one of these things is not like the others:
I’m not sure who’s standing to make money off of people switching from monogamy to polygamy, I haven’t seen paid advertisements for polygamy, and it seems to be more worth five minutes’ thought than does, say, choice of toilet paper.
P.S. Oh, and welcome to Less Wrong! I look forward to hearing your take on a number of other issues, as you appear to have a very different argumentative toolkit from the usual one here.
The issue I’m raising is that the logic of greater options and choices is the logic of consumerism. Renata Salecl has some interesting observations about this emphasis and how it generates anxieties and personal crises that directly challenge the ideological assumption that more choice can’t be bad. (See here: “Who Am I For Myself? Anxiety & the Tyranny of Choice: http://slought.org/content/11318/) As far as social critiques go, this is far more challenging to deal with than this post, which smugly & uncritically assumes that it stands outside of social norms. The truth is that society is not constituted by a single homogeneous set of norms which we can easily reject, but multiple conflicting and contradictory ones. Here, the norms of consumerism and choice come into conflict with the norms of marriage. Given what I’ve said about the tyranny of choice, the real challenge to our thinking would be to see this as an reason to reject polyamory. What if the main benefit of monogamy is that it provides relief from this tyranny? Sometimes you hear happily married people say that they are glad to not have to deal with the dating scene, which is a very interesting example of how the removal of choice is experienced as a benefit. A point I should make here is that the issue I have is definitely not with the practice of polyamory itself, but the stated rationale for it. It’s certainly possible to have non-consumerist justifications for polyamory—Mormon justifications, Muslim justifications, etc. The main problem I have is this uncritical assumption of the social norm that says more choice & fewer limitations is always better, particularly when it dresses itself up as nonconformity.
This ideal is particularly inappropriate applied to sexuality. The standard dictum that we can only truly enjoy ourselves once we get rid of all limitations should be reversed. Limitation is an inherent part of enjoyment, especially in the domain of sexuality. Why do we get erotic enjoyment from the sight of naked bodies but in tribal cultures where they walk around nude all day, they don’t? Nudity is only erotic if it is taboo and prohibited, which suggests that transgressing a prohibition is an essential part of sex. This explains the otherwise strange paradox of why mainstream society tacitly accepts infidelity so long as it’s discreet. Why not just make it official? The obvious conclusion: it would ruin all the fun. It’s well-known that the easiest way to make something attractive is to prohibit it which may explain why the rate of illegal drug use is higher in the US than in places with fewer prohibitions like the Netherlands. The mistake to avoid is thinking that the only purpose of the social regulation of sexual activity is to put a stop to enjoyment, and so it is therefore repressive. It is repressive, and that creates the moment of true erotic enjoyment, in the guilty or rebellious pleasure of having broken the rules. Thinking of society and social oppression as a consistent set of oppressive rules and regulations which we should try to reject misses the point. Ideology is at multiple levels, both in the rules and the ways in which we are solicited to break them, and the real social critique is not the cliche to always question the rules, question authority, etc. Rather, we should question the implicit rules of how we’re expected to break the rules.
So it’s very interesting how polyamory reverses the standard traditional relationship between law and transgression. The standard model is explicit official prohibition, but unofficial tacit acceptance of rule-breaking, which is then eroticized. Polyamory’s approach is officially about freedom—break free from the constraints of monogamy, etc—and unofficially filled with rules and prohibitions as I pointed out earlier, which we’re nonetheless assured aren’t really rules, only guidelines and suggestions, etc., which further attests to their secretive nature. Here we might find an example of how devotion to the law and the rules functions as a kind of obscene form of enjoyment in itself. In addition to the nonconformist polyamorist who gets an erotic thrill from freaking out the squares and is obsessed with what they think and how they are scandalized, there is also the conformist polyamorist who finds erotic enjoyment in the highly regulated and controlled lifestyle and in obedience to it’s secret rules and rituals. Maybe they unconsciously realize that standard monogamy model offers too many loopholes to violate the rules, they need them to be much stronger. We might also notice all the typical jokes about the wife as “a ball and chain”, keeping a man’s testicles in her purse, he’s whipped, etc., obvious references to BDSM practices. These jokes aren’t just incidental, they are part of the institution itself, even secretly integrated into its rituals, in the coded exchange of rings, an obvious symbolic representation of becoming a (sex) slave. The simplistic vision of standard marriage is that it’s very boring and vanilla, but what if it is a kind of kinky BDSM roleplaying?
I hope you don’t mind if I make some observations and suggestions about the form of communication you’re using, since there appears to be a little bit of culture clash at work right now. (I acknowledge up-front that a discussion of form isn’t a critique of content, and at any rate, I’m neither a practitioner nor an evangelist of polyamory myself.)
In a threaded conversation, brevity is the soul of communication: a few clearly stated points are much easier to reply to than a long essay. (Your first comment communicated much more clearly than the subsequent ones; it’s no coincidence that it was upvoted.) I completely understand the desire to expand more and more on a point in order to be more persuasive and less misunderstood, but in this format it’s usually much more effective to keep it short at first, then reply to specific questions and objections. (Here on the Internet, there’s much more of a tendency for people to gloss over long sections of text. You can mitigate this to some extent by bolding or italicizing the key points; clicking the “Help” link below the comment box tells you how to do this here.)
Second, the repeated “What If” questions stand out from the usual form of discourse. There’s a norm on Less Wrong (not universal, but common) of stating the actual reasons that cause you personally to hold a position, rather than tossing things out to see if anything sticks. (People do regularly play Devil’s Advocate, but even in this case they’re listing the reasons that would be most persuasive to them if not for their objections). I’d find it more helpful and interesting if you told us which of these considerations actually lead you to rule out polyamory as an option for you.
Again, this isn’t an indictment of your reasoning, just a note on what differences in mode of expression might be making this discussion less effective than it could be. (Reciprocally, please tell us if any specific aspects of Less Wrong writing style strike you as unnecessarily smug, uncritical, etc; that sort of input is extremely helpful to a community like ours, and we need to listen to newer voices to hear it.)
I appreciate the feedback. Once I respond to people’s objections, I’ll be on my way.
This is (obviously) your prerogative; however, I would ask that you give it a bit more time than that. I’ll just be blunt about why: you need LessWrong or something like it.
Okay, I know how annoying it is to be told about your own psychology by a stranger, but here goes. Your stated opinions, while extremely interesting and clearly well-educated, are of a form that makes it apparent you’re starting with a bottom line and working upwards to arguments. That is, in the particular case of polyamory, you seem to be starting with annoyance at polyamorists and, as orthonormal implied, throwing out plausible arguments to see what sticks. The ethic of this community is to use rationality to become right rather than prove ourselves right. We don’t always succeed at this, but we try.
Consider a thought experiment.
Think of all the hundreds of opinions you have on various issues and fact questions relating to science, public policy, economy, ethics, culture, sexuality, etc.
Realistically, you are dead wrong on at least one of those opinions (just like you know everybody else is). If you can’t accept that as likely, I give up.
But you don’t know which ones are wrong. Also, your brain is really terrible at telling you which ones, because it has dozens of (largely opaque) reasons for keeping its current beliefs. It only looks for confirmatory evidence. It likes stories better than statistics. It fears the social stigma of changing your mind. Perhaps worse than anything, the smarter you get, the better you get at rationalizing your bad ideas to yourself! I could go on, and on, and on...
Our community is pretty good at digging up those biases, exposing them to the light of day, and challenging you to question opinions previously held which might have been influenced by them. If you can do the same for others, the mutual benefit redounds to the favour of both.
So if you just want to convince people you’re right, you should indeed leave. If you want to try to be more right, stick around and keep talking. That is why I am here (I’m a relative newbie). I want to be right about all those issues. It’s an ethical question. And so far I have found nothing better than LW, for all its flaws.
I agree that we all need what you claim LessWrong wants to be, but I don’t think I’m retreating in any way from having my assumptions scrutinized. If anything, the problem is the opposite one, most the replies haven’t identified the key points on which my argument turns or their weaknesses, instead they’ve largely seized on what I think are irrelevant or incidental points, basic misunderstandings or just jumping to odd conclusions. I don’t think my arguments are insincere attempts to see what I can make stick, I intend to defend them as best as I can & I can’t even find an example of something that might be interpreted like that. But I respect the desire to keep this community free of disruptive elements, and concede the right of the members of the community to determine what that is and if it includes verbosity and inadequate formatting.
My purpose is not to prove myself right, but to help drive the debate to a less obvious and boring conclusion by calling into questioning some of the assumptions and the frame in which the problem of polyamory is posed. I think the post implicitly frames the problem in such a way as to unfairly tilt the playing field against those who disagree. But many of my comments have been down-voted without explanation, and the ease with which you can register your disagreement without having to confront the substance of what you disagree with (or do not understand), IMO goes against what you claim to be the purpose of this community.
At this time, your only comment with a negative score has 5 direct replies.
I like interesting, aesthetically pleasing ideas. But ceteris paribus, the simplest ones are the ones most likely to be correct. Some of our communication difficulty may be a matter of phrasing—can you see why something like this:
makes it sound like you’re engaging in cognition motivated by something other than finding the truth?
Not at all. Are you suggesting I’m attempting to conceal the truth? I don’t know how this could be misconstrued, it seems perfectly straight-forward to me. The author suggests that polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms. I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis. I’m at a loss as to why this is considered out of bounds.
Polyamory can be the result of a thought process that challenges social norms. It can also be the result of a thought process that sees a good thing and then wants more of it. The process by which one arrives at polyamory does not invalidate the destination, even if the process is irrational.
It’s not that your argument is out of bounds, precisely. It’s that you seem to be relying on a definition of polyamory that is the almost exact opposite of the one in common use.
Ethical non-monogamy doesn’t align with social norms in any modern, economically well-developed society. A challenging and interesting thesis is useless if it is contradicted by all available evidence.
No, khafra is suggesting that your cognition seems to be motivated by something other than finding the truth. Here’s a thought experiment that shows that does not imply that you’re attempting to conceal the truth:
Let’s suppose that I found out that by believing the world is flat, I could win $5. I might then attempt to perform cognitive operations which will result in my believing that the world is flat, that are ultimately motivated by the desire to win $5. It does not entail that anywhere in this process will I actively attempt to conceal the truth, especially to outside observers.
This statement:
Seems to imply that you engaged in something like bottom-line reasoning, wherein one writes one’s conclusion on the bottom line of a proof and then tries to find justifications for the conclusion.
A red light came on at this one. Polyamory is overly conformist to social norms? Do you take it to be less controversial than monogamy? As far as I can see, monogamy is still the default expectation.
Oh, I see. The complete statement is that the claim is that polyamory is good because it offers more choice and flexibility. My response is that far from an advantage, this seems like a good reason to reject polyamory insofar as it is justified in that way. I’m contesting the pre-eminence of the value of flexibility in every area of life because I think they discourage deeper, more costly forms of connection in intimate relationships. In this area, I think inflexibility & limitation are virtues. I even claim that limitation in general plays a prominent, positive role in sexual enjoyment, so the specific limitation of having only one partner doesn’t necessarily prevent or inhibit enjoyment. Although I will readily concede here that it might for some.
If it can be shown that the absolute valorization of flexibility doesn’t inhibit deep intimacy, that intimacy has no value and there are no costs to inhibiting it, or that polyamory doesn’t valorize flexibility and therefore doesn’t inhibit intimacy, then I have no objection to it. A more minor issue is whether polyamory falsely posits itself as a nonconformist lifestyle when it is simply novel. Here, I claim that false forms of nonconformity retard social progress by promoting misconceptions about the nature of society, but this objection is about polyamorist discursive practices, not the actual practice of polyamory.
If I attempted to claim that polyamory is good at all in my original post, it was unintentional. In general, I would justify polyamory as good for some people because it makes those people happier than the other options available to them. For people who would be less happy if they were polyamorous, polyamory is a terrible idea.
Choice, then, is not good for its own sake, but rather because it offers opportunities for individuals to become happier. It is an instrumental value, not a terminal one.
I’m quite curious: what do you mean by nonconformity?
This has already been said, but I’d like to make it a little more explicit: Those are not opposites. “Polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms” and “Polyamory is overly conformist to social norms” would be opposites. But the whether “Polyamory is overly conformist to social norms” is true, is unrelated to whether it is challenging or interesting.
Is this perhaps a miswording? Earlier, you seemed to be making the point that polyamory was purposefully nonconformist. It seems to me that perhaps what you’re trying to say is that polyamory depends on the existing social norms, as something to rebel against.
Assuming that’s what you were trying to say, I don’t see that as a good reason to avoid polyamory: If the theory is correct, then it seems to me that the largest number of people will be made happy by a dynamic equilibrium, where one generation (or group of generations) rebels by being polyamorous and the next rebels by being monogamous and then the cycle repeats. Why would that be objectionable? Or perhaps you’re trying to optimize for something other than happiness?
Ah, yes I guess I’m sliding between multiple definitions of nonconformity. When I said that polyamory is consciously nonconformist, I mean that in the sense that they adopt a position that is understood that way by their peers, their parents, etc. Nonconformity here is adopting idiosyncratic practices that may be stigmatized, with the intention of opening up new possibilities for living one’s life. When I say the opposite, that polyamory is overly conformist, I mean to challenge that idea—what is usually understood as nonconformity arrives at it’s position not by challenging social norms, but by rejecting the inconsistency of social norms. Where the monogamist has multiple conflicting and overlapping values of commitment and choice and freedom, etc., the polygamist arrives at her position by valorizing a single, unambiguous value and rejecting anything that conflicts with it. The most precise term for this is not nonconformity, it’s fundamentalism.
It’s certainly possible that a given social problem is caused by an inadequate commitment to a single value, but I want to clarify that this is the claim being made, and that I don’t agree, in two ways. First, I contest the idea that having a single unambiguous value to govern human social life is achievable or even desirable, and second, that intimate relationships are improved by introducing more flexibility and choice. I think we are very sensitive to the problems that are created by a lack of choice in relationships, and remarkably blind to the problems that are caused by too much choice. The post attempts to exploit this blindness by asking us rationally justify monogamy, a task that can only be accomplished by appealing to a set of values that are waning. In my view, the fact that we can’t do this convincingly is an apt illustration of the malaise that afflicts society.
Do you have evidence for this? It seems like a product of generalizing from one example, or some similar bias (correspondence bias, perhaps?), to me. I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t consider multiple conflicting values and determine that polygamy was the best way to satisfy most of them. (I will admit that a higher-than-usual chance that there’s a reason that I’m not aware of, since I’m rather unusual when it comes to how I think about relationships, but as the person making a claim, it’s still your responsibility to provide evidence for that claim.)
Hm.
I think this is the relevant quote:
I don’t know if WrongBot has read enough here to know this—if e hasn’t, you may be right about eir intentions—but in the context of what ‘preferable’ is used to mean here, that quote is not necessarily asking for a rational justification. Preferences are also strongly dependent on values—which are arational, not irrational—so it would be perfectly valid for someone to answer that question with something like “I value the security that I get from monogamous relationships” or “I value my status within my social group, which disapproves of polygamy”, with no further explanation necessary. “I value my time, and thus prefer not to spend it thinking about things like this”, which seems to be your objection, is also valid (though it would be a good idea to clearly specify what ‘like this’ means) - but, not everyone shares that value!
I’m male and I’ve read most of the sequences here, to clear up a couple pieces of uncertainty.
I was asking people to justify their preferences in terms of their values, so, yes, “I value the security that I get from monogamous relationships” is a perfectly valid justification, and there’s nothing irrational about it. Though I might ask for a clarification of what kind of security the person means (Social? Fear of abandonment?), and whether they’ve considered the ways that other kinds of relationships might provide or fail to provide that security. Why do you believe what you believe? That’s the ultimate question I’m asking.
In principle, this is true, but I take the polyamory movement as having been heavily influenced by the 60s counterculture movement and the sexual revolution, influenced philosophically by Romantic poets and Rousseau. One of the major countercultural critiques of mainstream society is hypocritical, inconsistent and contradictory values.
Empirically, this has been demonstrated by Jonathan Haidt. Maybe you are already familiar with his work. He proposes 5 moral foundations—Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect, Purity/Sacredness—these are different ways of approaching moral questions. He shows that self-described liberals tend to value the first 2 far more than the last 3, where conservatives value them more equally. It’s fairly easy to identify the countercultural critique of society through these categories, by observing that they largely reject notions like respect for authority, religious justifications rooted in purity & sacredness, and loyalty to nation & family, taking these values to be vices rather than virtues and seeing all the evil in the world as a result of them.
Aside from that, the institution of marriage and monogamy is governed by the norms of permanent commitment and connection, admittedly less so than in previous eras. It’s difficult to see how an activist who rejects the culture’s major symbols and practices embodying commitment could not be intending to reject it wholesale, especially when the alternate values of flexibility are emphasized so heavily instead.
You seem to be making the argument that polyamory reminds you of a 60′s political movement and that therefore polyamorous people probably have the same intellectual values as leading thinkers in that movement. I find this nonsensical. I’m polyamorous, and I certainly wish that society in general would view polyamory as an acceptable alternative, but I’m not polyamorous in order to rebel against society, nor do I want to oppose the institution of marriage in any way. Nor do I have anything against commitment: quite to the contrary, I feel rather strongly that I need committed relationships in order to be happy.
So are you saying that I’m wrong to assert that the polyamory subculture has deep philosophical roots in counterculture? Or that those roots influence the presuppositions of people who consciously identify themselves with it?
I should also point out that as the 4th top contributor in a fairly diverse intellectual community outside of the polyamory community, your personal values and opinions are a poor counterexample.
I agree that a disproportionate fraction of the people practicing polyamory probably have values that are related to the ones you are discussing. But I don’t think there’s enough evidence to show that an overwhelming majority, or even a simple majority, of polyamorists would have the kinds of values you suggest they have. (The value of “opposing commitment”, in particular, seems very abnormal.) Possibly not even a remarkable minority.
In my experience people become polyamorous via a highly diverse set of routes, and affiliation with counterculture is just one of them. I’d expect there to be at least as many people who came to be polyamorous out of the simple realization that monoamory simply isn’t working for them than people who became polyamorous due to any particular counterculture ties.
I’m not sure what you mean. You were making a generalization about polyamorous people, and I gave a counterexample; I don’t know what me being the number four contributor on Less Wrong has to do with it. But if that makes me personally disqualified, I also have many polyamorous friends who are not part of this community and who most definitely also do not fit the profile you’re describing.
Ah-ha. You seem to be conflating polygamy-as-a-lifestyle with polygamy-as-a-political-movement. I know next to nothing about polygamy-as-a-political-movement, and don’t much care to—one can easily adopt polygamy-as-a-lifestyle without it, if that seems to be in one’s best interests.
Regarding the five values, polygamy-as-a-lifestyle seems to me to have the potential to be compatible with all of them, and in some ways it may do a better job of fulfilling one or more of them—including the latter three—depending on how you define the terms.
I’m polyromantic and asexual, and consider my current situation (two major partners and a handful of currently-important other relationships) to be very good in terms of all five, and better at care, respect, and purity/sacredness than most marriages that I’m aware of. (My concept of purity/sacredness is probably nonstandard, though.)
You’re conflating monogamy, marriage, and commitment—and probably conflating sex with those, as well. This is somewhat understandable, since in this culture they’re strongly correlated, but it’s not very accurate in practice. Most kinds of poly relationships that I’m aware of—including mine—involve some kind of commitment; the fact that that commitment doesn’t necessarily take the form of a promise never to have sex with anyone else or an official document doesn’t make the commitment any less real.
One difference that I have with this community is that I take seriously the influence of social context, the history of ideas and the discursive practices that help determine our horizon of meaning. To me, drawing attention to social context in which an idea acquires meaning is not conflating issues, that is the issue. Ignoring or downplaying it means we’re trying to ignore the background in which certain problems become salient, acquire meaning and new choices become a possibilities. That’s just not reality.
I’m not merely pointing to the political movement, but the entire culture of polyamory. What are it’s values, shared beliefs, assumptions, norms, categories and justifications, and how does it posit itself relative to mainstream culture? The fact that you identify yourself as polyromantic probably means you have largely adopted that worldview. And here’s another area where I differ from the individualist bent of this community—even if you personally do not suffer from the ill effects of a particular idea, I claim that you have an ethical duty to consider the effects of promoting an idea if the influence of it’s philosophical presuppositions has a negative impact on society.
I want to point out that, at least so far, you haven’t disputed my contention that the poly subculture holds flexibility as the pre-eminent value, only that you personally don’t.
Considering the second of the two to be much more important doesn’t make it not a conflation to collapse the first into it.
That’s a matter of your perspective. You assume that the concepts are ontologically separate to begin with, and are then collapsed, simply because in this case they are made conceptually distinct by being named differently. I disagree, I say the conceptual distinction is artificial, used to avoid the full scope of the issue by ruling certain facts a priori irrelevant without having to consider them.
If two concepts are separable, then considering them to be the same is “ruling certain facts a priori irrelevant”—specifically, whatever facts allow them to be separated. I do not see how it would be possible for the opposite to also be true.
Which facts do you think are being declared irrelevant in the process of looking at polygamy-as-a-lifestyle separately from polygamy-as-a-political-movement?
I don’t consider them to be the same, I think individuals and culture mutually influence each other and interact in complex ways. There are facts that are relevant to the debate that are being disallowed based on a preference for reductionist approaches that I don’t share. This preference wants to consider an individual’s motivations independently of the culture in which he or she is embedded. It’s incorrect to say that I disallow facts that would allow them to be treated separately, I have no problem with that. For example, if it can be shown that the cultural issues have no bearing on the issue. Given that questions about mainstream vs. subculture and conformity vs. nonconformity are deeply connected to this issue, I’m skeptical that this can be done, but I certainly have no objection to you trying.
The specific facts that I think are relevant is the polyamory culture’s connection to counterculture. Ignoring this influence means we’re debating whether polyamory could be logically justified, which is an abstract intellectual exercise that has little relevance to the question of how polyamory is actually justified. I assume that the rationale for this is that if polyamory can be shown to be logically justifiable, it doesn’t matter too much if one gets there by a different route; that it doesn’t matter if you are right for the wrong reasons. I disagree with that, I think it does matter.
The origin of an idea probably has a long term influence, but ideas also get changed as people use them. Not paying attention to the current state of an idea, or the movement which is using it means that you miss a lot.
Are you implying that the movement has changed its philosophical presuppositions? If so, please provide a citation to back this up.
I’m finding your comments harder and harder to parse. I’m not sure if this is a sign that I need to take a break and come back to this when I’m fresh, or a function of you being evasive, but either way, taking a break seems like a good idea. I’ll come back to this thread tomorrow.
It’s not you. I am unable to parse any of alsomike’s comments.
He’s formulating his arguments in a paradigm foreign to this site, one that I would hesitantly identify as post-structuralist. I can mostly follow his arguments, but only because I thought I wanted to major in English in my freshman year of college.
The problem with post-structuralism and other similar paradigms, especially in the context of this site, is that it doesn’t seem to be terribly concerned with truth as rationalists define it; this makes it a particularly poor tool for discovering truth. Very good for circular arguments based on poorly-defined jargon, though.
Interesting. I find that his arguments are clear, but wrong.
I think I have a mental habit of thinking “what might this mean?” and coming up with something—generally something good enough that people think I understand them. It takes quite a bit to get me to think something is nonsense.
None of your comments have been downvoted to invisibility, and your total karma is non-negative. For someone so new, you’re actually not doing too badly. Others can chime in, of course, but I don’t see any reason for you not to stick around… unless you’re more interested in winning arguments than improving your rationality, that is.
While I suppose that there must be people who actually think like this, I myself have never met one.
Is it smug and uncritical to point out the existence of a social norm? All I’ve done is to observe that the norm exists, (very briefly) describe alternatives, and ask “Why do you believe what you believe?” This doesn’t seem to be a question you’re interested in. While the paradox of choice is well-documented, it is not a linear function. Too much choice can be paralyzing, but we are happier when we can make important choices for ourselves.
First, religion is a poor justification for anything. Second, the fact that polyamory is a choice does not mean that a preference for more choice justifies it; the question to be answered is still, “why choose polyamory?” One excellent reason is utilitarian: if polyamory is anticipated to make you and your loved ones happier than any alternative you’ve considered, why, you should choose it.
Choice is only helpful when it is possible to evaluate one’s options by some pre-existing metric. If I were to offer you three closed, unlabeled boxes, allowing you to choose which one to take does not improve your expected outcome.
I will try to sum up your position: you’re saying that
(1) limitation is inherently important to sex and romance;
(2) explicit prohibitions are often implicitly allowed to be violated;
(3) your problem is not with polyamoury per se, but with the fact that its proponents want explicit approval rather than mere legal toleration, which would
(4) provide too much choice (less choice is a relief for many monogamous couples) and undermine the sexiness-inducing nature of the prohibitions against it.
Is this fair?
no, it isn’t.
you’ve summarized a few of mike’s descriptive claims regarding ″how the world works″ and extrapolated mike’s probable values from those claims and how they were presented, but neither his hypotheses nor his (unstated) values have much to do with the ″thrust″ of his argument.
to paraphrase mike in the language of lesswrong: the original post is framed in such a way as to make readers think it is Obviously Obvious that being a conformist is ‘bad’ and being a non-conformist is ‘good’. Lesswrongers havent noticed because the Schelling Points offered up in the original post align very neatly with the pre-rational values Lesswrongers are most likely to have.
wrongbot’s post does not give us a reliable procedure for uncovering conflicting values. it does not tell us when we should invest time and energy trying to reconcile the conflicts we uncover. it does not tell us how to reconcile values when we decide it’s a good idea. it basically just says, ″here’s a social norm that may be constraining your behavior!” and implies (subtlely) that you should start ignoring it if you cant think of any clever reasons [that you can translate into words] why you shouldnt. how does that further the cause of Rationality?
Let’s look at why Wrongbot actually included the “Unknown Knowns” part. Was it an attempt to sneak in psychological influence in favour of his preferred sexual pattern or was it because he wasn’t secure in his right to post on this topic and was trying to justify it by framing it as a cognitive bias? I suspect the later. That reduces the ‘dark’ rating I give it considerably (but raised the ‘wussiness’ rating commensurately.)
I obviously have an interest in the answer to this question, so please keep that in mind.
Your latter suggestion as to my intentions is much closer to the truth (and you may be entirely right and I may be rationalizing). Because I’m so new to this community, I was certainly trying to avoid posting something that looked inappropriate. This is a specific issue that I think rationalists should consider regardless of framing, and I won’t deny that to that end I attempted to present it in the best light possible.
The choice of frame wasn’t arbitrary, though. My writing process for the post basically involved explaining why considering alternatives to monogamy was a good idea, and then noticing that relationship style was an example of a broader problem which I hadn’t seen described on LessWrong, and that this observation would bring the post more in line with other content I’d seen on the site. Then I went through about five more drafts and hit submit.
I honestly believe that conformity is orthogonal to truth; that other people believe something makes it no more or less true (though it may provide evidence as to the thing’s truth, if those other people are particularly trustworthy or untrustworthy). The comments above and elsewhere indicate that I was not sufficiently clear in communicating that in my original post, and I would be grateful to anyone who suggested how I could have been more clear.
Thankyou for making a well reasoned and self reflective explanation in response to criticism what could quite reasonably be considered insulting.
Insulting or not, you had a point. And I try very hard to appreciate well-intentioned criticism, so don’t worry about it.
Ahh, I think I have conveyed that I would be reluctant to give insult, which isn’t the case. Insulting people is something that is gives negative terminal value in my preferences but it is something I am comfortable with as an instrumental means. It happens to be the case that you have the maturity to handle criticism, you do not have an emotional vulnerability there. Curiously, I would be more inclined to make a call of ‘wussiness!’ if I did think that you had an insecurity there, a button that could be pushed. That would be exactly the case where such stimulus would provoke the most positive influence. The reaction to having that button pushed simultaneously strengthens against the vulnerability to criticism and causes a confrontation of and improvement in the trait they are insecure about.
Pardon the tangent into abstract observations on human behavior and development processes. The subject fascinates me.
Negative? *blink* That possibility didn’t even occur to me. I thought the descriptive component rather obvious and the normative component neutral (commensurate transfer of any ‘negative’ component from one label to another.) Curious.
Now, I know with some confidence that calling out ‘wussiness’ is extremely effective in discouraging future examples. I am almost as confident that this applies even if me making the call is met with disapproval. I have collected a significant sample of cases of calling things wussy (or context appropriate alternatives) with intended positive influence.
With no replies except mine (as of this edit) I can delete my comment without losing face. The question I must ask myself is whether I am willing to potentially sacrifice status in order to make this influence. That question is easy, which gives a strong signal of the degree to which I consider ‘wussiness’ my enemy!
I’m a little confused. What is it you’re trying to discourage? People framing posts in terms of cognitive biases? This seems like something we’d want, and in fact I suggested that WrongBot frame the post in a more general way.
Okay, so to summarize again:
(1) WrongBot’s post assumes unjustifiably that non-conformity is obviously a good thing;
(2) monogamy is tied up intimately with human terminal values—values that are not well-addressed by the post and may even make rational justifications of monogamy superfluous;
(3) the demand for justification (or, failing that, rejection) of a social norm is somehow unfair or hasty, or again assumes non-conformity must be a good thing.
(1) Yes, but also I claim that WrongBot’s claim of nonconformity is simply false. He’s just applying a very widely held value in a slightly novel way.
(2) I think monogamy can be justified rationally, but this involves reconstructing certain values that have been eclipsed by consumerist logic
(3) The demand to justify our sexual practices or risk being put into stigmatized position of conformist is unfair.
Some further points: the debate of polyamory vs. monogamy is not, strictly speaking, a debate about whether it’s best to have one partner or multiple partners. It is partly about whether society should stigmatize the open deviation from the norm, but that is not the thrust of the argument here. There’s a stronger claim lurking here, that many people consider maximum choice and flexibility the royal road to happiness and since polyamory more adequately embodies this ideal, it is superior to monogamy, at least for those people. Once people examine their beliefs in the cold light of reason, they will choose what works for them, etc.
Upvoted for being a good & concise distillation of your concerns.
Which values would these be, and what do you mean by reconstructing them? I’m listening.
Well, as someone said to you above, I don’t think WrongBot’s intention was to stigmatize anyone. You could have simply said “I personally find polyamory icky” and that would have been considered a perfectly valid ‘justification.’ I understood him to be saying merely: here is an opportunity to reflect on this norm—I personally found my rejection of it to be a net positive in my life.
This is, IMO, your most interesting and defensible claim. It is certainly plausible that some or many modern Westerners and polyamorists are fetishizing “variety of choice” in their decisions, in the naive belief that greater choice leads to greater happiness. However, what is the right way of making such decisions then?
I suspect you’re defining “reason” too narrowly. For me, the ‘reasonable decision’ is basically by definition the best decision, given a thorough weighing of all potential factors that could come into play—including whatever objections to polyamory and arguments for monogamy you might have! Moreover, reason’s light is not cold, since before it can even get off the ground, it needs to know our warm and fluffy terminal values. When you think of reason, think “All Things Considered,” don’t think “Spock.”
I’ll repeat something I alluded to before: a happily married woman who listens to her sister’s dramatic dating stories and feels relief that she no longer has to worry about all that. This is an example of how removing choice and flexibility can be the source of happiness. This requires us to see choice in negative terms, which is actually quite difficult to do, because the problems of a lack of choice have been dramatized in movies and novels so often that we have a strong emotional resonance with them—for example, the familiar narrative of the son who is forced into the family business by an overbearing father, deprived of his opportunity to explore and pursue his dreams. The plot of the movie Ratatouille is something like this. We know intellectually that problems of too much choice exist, of course, but strong cultural narratives have deformed our cognition such that they appear insignificant to us. Just noticing and critiquing these values when they appear is a very useful thing to do.
One good example of this is a recent book called Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. The thesis is that women have extremely high expectations for potential husbands, to the point that they reject perfectly good men in the hopes that something better will come along. Eventually their options dwindle and they find themselves childless and unmarried in their 40s, which was the experience of the author. The problem here is buyer’s remorse. Given the wealth of options as well as the emphasis on getting the very best for yourself, this translates into a need for flexibility: form less secure, more temporary relationships until you find the one that gives you everything you want. I don’t really know what an improved decision-making process would be exactly, but the fact that our gut reaction to the title “Settle for Mr. Good Enough” is that this sounds patently absurd is a good gauge for our thinking. When this seems like wisdom rather than absurdity, we will know we have made progress. Having said that, I think the book is flawed because it doesn’t go far enough in it’s critique which forces the author to compromise the thesis.
Polyamory might posit itself as a solution to this problem of excess choice, diagnosing this situation as a problem of inflexibility within the social obligation to choose one person. If one person doesn’t have everything you need, you should find someone else who does, but why not have both of them? So polyamory addresses the problem of excess choice with still more flexiblity and choice, which in turn generates more crises which are then addressed by the proliferation of rules. To me, this points to the general unsustainability of flexibility as a single guiding norm, and also the undesirability of polyamory itself—in order to sustain this “freedom”, excessive regulation is required. This last point is of course a personal judgment; if others prefer heavily regulated sex lives, I have no reason to prevent them.
There’s a kind of knee-jerk analysis that happens: we see a difficult situation, and conclude that the ultimate problem is a lack of flexibility: things that are easy to change are always good, and things that are hard to change are always bad. Politically, this translate into support for right-wing economic policies, which are ideologically rendered as more flexible than the restrictive constraints of government action, and therefore preferable. And yes, I am aware that I am drawing another counterintuitive connection, between right-wing economic policies and left-wing sex politics, but I think there are unconscious shared assumptions underlying much countercultural politics that posits itself as radical, left-wing, etc.
I disagree with the first sentence. Since my disagreement hinges on the difference between partial and total derivatives I hope it is broadly interesting.
When Milton Friedman titled one of his books Free To Chose his underlying model was that happyness was a function both of the number of choices and the quality of the choices:
I see the consumerist position, that choice is good, meaning frac{partialh}{partialc}>0, as a crude vulgarisation of the argument above.
Trying to apply this to a 30 year old American contemplating polyamory, my assumption is that he has experience of how the inner dynamics of the modern American monogamous romance play out. Unhappy experience. Now he is wondering about the dynamics implicit in polyamory. He wants to know whether changing the rules produces a better game, and he knows that he cannot find out via the simple equation: more choice = better. He must consider how the players respond to the changed incentives produced by the new rules.
If q is a function of c, then h becomes a function of one independent variable, and your use of partials here doesn’t make sense, because you can’t hold c constant while changing q or vice versa.
You are making me feel old. My notation was orthodox in 1958. Indeed, in A Course Of Pure Mathematics, Tenth Edition, section 157, Hardy writes:
The distinction between the two functions is adequately shown by denoting the first by frac{df}{dx} and the second by frac{partialf}{partialx}, in which case the theorem takes the form frac{df}{dx}=frac{partialf}{partialx} frac{partialf}{partialy}frac{dy}{dx}; though this notation is also open to objection, in that it is a little misleading to denote the functions
I think your notation is still orthodox, or at least fairly common, nowadays. Wikipedia uses it on its total derivative page, for example, and it seems familiar to me.
I thought that this was the kind of situation partial derivatives are there for. AlanCrowe’s just applied the multivariable chain rule, if I’m getting it right.
Thanks, you (and Alan) are right. Sorry, it’s been a while.
This is actually an interesting point; however, sometimes it really is about the rules. Homosexuality was not illegal because that made it even sexier.
I think you have to pick one. Either polyamorists are misguided because they’re out to piss off the bourgeoisie with their nonconformity, or they’re misguided because they’re actually rule-bound conformists themselves. (Or they’re hypocrites, but that describes damn near everyone anyway.)
So the correct response to a suggestion that you think is: “It’s none of your business!”?
I thought Lesswrong was all about thinking, and becoming less wrong.
The OP didn’t demand you explain yourself, merely suggested you ought to consider why you believe what you believe. Seems a reasonable suggestion to me.