I still disagree. Or better, I think we may have been agreeing on reality and disagreeing on words all along.
Here is my schematic of my opinion (sorry I don’t have time for drawings)
Me: Evolution --> Good stuff about sex, such as sex being experientially good while it is happening.
Evolution --> Bad things about sex. Humans ----- destroy----> many of bad things about sex made by evolution.
There. Since humans don’t destroy the good things (except for part of the sensorial pleasure in case of condoms), then my claim which is about calibration is true.
We are calibrated to have sex, say, on X% of occasions. This calibration was good for the purposes of its days. Now we have changed the environment and we are Under calibrated. That is, if the quasi-reasons for the original calibration were kept (including all the social and emotional reasons you mention), we would have sex on more than X% of occasions.
This is valid for monogamous sex, for polygamous sex, etc… We are, I insist, under calibrated for it, just like we are under calibrated for fearing driving automobiles, and over-calibrated for fearing snakes. And for the same reasons. The system that made the original calibration did not catch up.
Another distiction worth mentioning, coming from the Seligman literature on positive psychology is that there are three kinds of happiness. Experiential happiness (or joy). Meaningful life (related to the memory-self, in kahneman’s term), and Flow (made famous by Csikszentmihalyi).
In your drawing, the happiness on the right is Joy and Flow. The happiness on the middle bottom is the memory-self meaningful one. And I’m steel-manning you strongly here, but I’ll say that the “happy” on the top is also “meaningful” to avoid saying that the HappyX causes Happiness.
We may have distinct usages for the word “fun”. You seem to use it to refer to the Meaningful Life, and I used it almost strictly to refer to Joy. As far as I recall, it is common for different people to systematically refer to happiness by meaning one of the three kinds, and I see no reason for the same not to have happened with “fun” here, specially if you consider how The Fun Sequence barely touches anything resembling flow or joy.
You haven’t shown that sex causes (not just correlates with) any kind of happiness. You are just speculating wildly. Even the weaker version of your claim “sex is fun,” is only sometimes true—sometimes sex is awkward, uncomfortable, frustrating, painful, unsatisfying, etc. So you’re acting like sex is ontologically fun, when of course it isn’t. Crucially, you fail to take into account the fact that the same inhibitions that keep people from having more sex are likely keeping them from having bad sex.
You also write from an entirely atomistic point of view, not even addressing the way our sex behaviors affect society. This is also a sign of the hubris I mentioned.
Allow me to reframe your argument, to illustrate how silly it is:
Eating is fun, and people who have more to eat are happier.
Evolution gave us some inhibitions about eating.
We now have antacids, painkillers, and liposuction to mitigate the harms of overeating.
Therefore we don’t eat enough: we would have more fun if we ate even more.
to a large extent this is completely true. We have cooking, preserving, and nutrition information that keeps food from killing us with disease, indigestion, and allergies. Plenty of people DO eat more food, because we have different built-in hangups about food. Plenty of people get OVER evolutionary disincentives to greater enjoy more varieties of food than they ever would’ve in the natural environment. Spiciness, bitterness, every acquired taste is something people train themselves to enjoy in order to get more fun out of eating because we’ve turned those things from danger signs into pleasant spandrels. Your food argument is actually a perfect support for Diego’s argument as long as you don’t leave out dozens of crucial facts.
People are more promiscuous than we were before birth-control pills/vaccines. Diego claims to know that we are still under-calibrated. There is just no reason to believe this.
Please, stop claiming I’m saying people should be promiscuous. It hurts my primatology reader eyes to read it.
Promiscuous is a name given to species that only have sex without pair-bonding (such as bonobos)
Whereas increasing sex could be done in soo many other ways. 1) More sex with only one partner 2) More partners spread across time 3)More partners spread across space 4) More partners in the same bed at the same time 5) Fewer partners and more sex with each.
I’m tired of this discussion.
Look, there are many claims, no reason to agree with all of them if you don’t want.
Sex is a pleasurable act most times. Evolution made it so by putting nerves in the sex parts that, for instance, cause orgasm.
Most people enjoy having sex.
Sex was more dangerous in the year 334 than it is today in 2013.
Sex was more dangerous year −100 000 than it is today.
Our minds were shaped more intensely for it’s sex related cognition between 2 million years ago, and two hundred years ago, than during the last 200 years.
If you call how much we like sex due to that process “calibration”, you can say that our calibration is more precise for the pre-medicine, pre-condom era, than for today. Were the same pressures and forces acting back then, we would have more, lots more sex than we do now. For a rough, rough approximation, you can keep the fertility rates stable (number of children per woman), but allowing people to use contraceptives. They’d have to have much more sex for the same amount of babies.
The thing for which sex was designed (babies) currently happens much less because of sex. So more sex is a way to “correct” for it. This if you wanted to play evolution’s baby-making game. But no sane being does.
What you want is to have a good life.
So you could mean a life with more flow experience. Well, then, have more sex.
A life with more meaningful experience. Have more deep relationships (which may include more or less sex).
Or a life with more sensorial pleasure (joy). Have more sex. And more massages. More kissing.
Your counterargument mentions social, and emotional things that preclude current humans from having sex with others (remember, more partners is not what I mean’t by more sex) I understood you meant things like jealousy, guilt, fear, and “next-day disgust”. All those things exist in many cultures etc…
They are embedded in our original calibration calculation up to a point. For the sake of argument, say 80% were embedded already and we don’t have to worry about them, they do not shift the burden of reason back to me.
So the remaining question is: Are 20% (or however much) of the negative part of the moral/emotional subset of the calibration, which was produced by western civilization and someone’s family and upbringing, enough to say that we over-corrected, are having too much sex, and on average, are suffering because of that. Or at least would suffer, had we more sex.
I think this is unlikely. On average, I’ll say it is nearly impossible. Of course there are people out there, maybe you are one of them, who would do best to reduce their sex lives (either in sheer quantity or number of partners). For some, 0 may be the best amount of sex to live a good life. It doesn’t strike me as obvious that that will be more than a tiny, tiny, tiny minority.
Think about kissing. Kissing is also good, transmit diseases, etc… I’ll bet we kiss more people than your average !kung, and I don’t think we regret doing so. It seems that the same goes for sex.
We have invented lots of sweets, and the same argument (which you made in a funny form) can be made for eating (not overeating as your caricature, but eating more things that taste better than crude non-salted potato). And look at us. Voila, we indeed do cook much better food than was eaten by our paleo-ancestors.
I am all for the health benefits of a paleo-based diet. But I do think that high above in the skyes the ethical judges of the world would look back into the invention of delicious grandma cooking and consider it a good idea that improved life. I think they would also say we did well by kissing more people when populations increased. And they would also say we would do well to have more sex than we do.
I’ll see you on judgement day, and we can ask them (Bentham, Singer, and the other Utilitarians who guard the ethics balance) ourselves. Or we can invite a hardcore utilitarian into the conversation and let him do the estimation.
Meanwhile, I”ll have a little bit more sex, you’ll have a litle bit less sex, and both of us, hopefully, will change policy when life stops feeling better because of our adopted policy.
About your “you are assuming sex is ontologically good”. Look, sex is good, I have mentioned that if you ask people how happy they are during activities, sex beats all but conversation with friends in all studies I saw. Check Layard’s “Happiness Lessons from a New Science” for some stats. It is a factual issue, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, then the argument doesn’t follow, and we are done here. If sex is good, then we can go on. Do you truly believe that sex is bad? Is that your true rejection? I have lived 26 years in the same planet as you have, I’ve seen many cultures, and I’ve read hundreds of books. I’m sure I found your claim no more than 3 times. but I’m sure I’ve heard sex being praised as good at least five hundred times. I say that we can say about sex something similar to what we can say against death, paraphrasing Yvain.
Anyone can tell you why sex is good. But it takes a very particular kind of person to tell you why sex may be bad.
You say the sex we are not having may be bad. True. You found a way in which my whole claim can be wrong. If the sex that is being had in the world is good, or very good, but all the counterfactual sex lying in nearby possible worlds sucks, than we are in pretty good shape when it comes to ethical calibration. We should High-five humanity and remain stably in the actual world. Yet all my readings on the metaphysics of possible worlds, by Lewis, Stalnacker, Kripke, Fauconnier never indicated this peculiar metaphysical asymmetry happening.
For this world, the only one in which we can do stats (even though we are not good at it) write “Frequencey” “Happiness” and “Intercourse” on google scholar, you’ll see loads of studies saying that penile vaginal intercourse increases happiness within relationships (the other forms of sex not necessarily). It does so specially when women have orgasm. And this kind of happiness is the Memory self, meaningful one. The only one which has my position in a more dubious role.
I do think that if more sex implied, necessarily, less intensity within one’s relationship, and less sex within one’s relationship, more sex would be bad. Relationships are very, very important for happiness.
But many, many people are single, and more sex would benefit them. Many are in an open relationship, and more sex (even with other people) would benefit them. Many (despite my despise) are in a closed relationship and betray their partners regularly, I have no idea if that benefits them, but would guess that overall it does not, and also doesn’t their partner. Most people live serial relationships and probably more sex would benefit them.
A final point is that what I originally meant by calibration, that has not even begun to enter this debate, is that we are fine tuned to only finding sex with person X acceptable if X possesses qualities Y T U V S. Many of those qualities are fine-tuned for genetic purposes. So when you just want to have intercourse, you are making a bad choice to select against people who have ~Y ~T U V S. The sex would still be good (or the new relationship would still be good), your brain would get used to this ~T ~Y thing, and a person who does not have Y or T (your future partner, wife, husband etc...) would have gained access to having sex with you.
An example: As I mentioned, I like women with a good looking upper back, shoulders etc… If I cut off all the other women from my available potential candidates for a wife, girlfriend, date, or one night stand. I’d be super selective, and this would make me reject lots of awesome women who lack this one trait.
This seems bad for me and for them.
If I could override that stupid cognition, I’d have more potential mates to select and be selected from.
Please, stop claiming I’m saying people should be promiscuous. It hurts my primatology reader eyes to read it. Promiscuous is a name given to species that only have sex without pair-bonding (such as bonobos)
“Promiscuous” is not a jargon term invented by primatologists, it means “Having many sexual relationships, esp. transient ones.” This is very precisely what you recommend in your post. You shouldn’t insist that people not use words in the way they are commonly used, just because you are used to seeing them in some other context.
I”ll have a little bit more sex, you’ll have a litle bit less sex
Your reading comprehension has failed you yet again. I’ve never argued against having more sex. I’ve just pointed out that the promiscuous transient sexual relationships with multiple partners you recommend don’t actually make people happier (I cited research that points this out in my older posts.) Married people actually have more sex, and they are empirically much happier than the promiscuous singles you encourage people to emulate.
I didn’t say that was the meaning, I just said it hurts my ears, and asked you for a favour. I didn’t recommend what you said I did, as you know.
You can’t be serious that those are the things you choose to respond to, and the rest you choose to ignore. Strawmanning at its worst. You are not (being in this discussion) intellectually honest. I’m out.
You never responded substantively to any of my points, instead just reasserting your speculations as though they were fact. There is no reason for me to keep reiterating the substantive arguments I made, which you never rebutted. Instead, you just kept reasserting your speculative claims as though they were fact.
I assume this is because you can’t actually find any evidence to support your assertions (unlike me, I actually did the research and cited it in my earlier comment.)
Ok. I see your point, big and clear now.
I still disagree. Or better, I think we may have been agreeing on reality and disagreeing on words all along.
Here is my schematic of my opinion (sorry I don’t have time for drawings)
Me: Evolution --> Good stuff about sex, such as sex being experientially good while it is happening. Evolution --> Bad things about sex.
Humans ----- destroy----> many of bad things about sex made by evolution.
There. Since humans don’t destroy the good things (except for part of the sensorial pleasure in case of condoms), then my claim which is about calibration is true.
We are calibrated to have sex, say, on X% of occasions. This calibration was good for the purposes of its days. Now we have changed the environment and we are Under calibrated. That is, if the quasi-reasons for the original calibration were kept (including all the social and emotional reasons you mention), we would have sex on more than X% of occasions.
This is valid for monogamous sex, for polygamous sex, etc… We are, I insist, under calibrated for it, just like we are under calibrated for fearing driving automobiles, and over-calibrated for fearing snakes. And for the same reasons. The system that made the original calibration did not catch up.
Another distiction worth mentioning, coming from the Seligman literature on positive psychology is that there are three kinds of happiness. Experiential happiness (or joy). Meaningful life (related to the memory-self, in kahneman’s term), and Flow (made famous by Csikszentmihalyi).
In your drawing, the happiness on the right is Joy and Flow. The happiness on the middle bottom is the memory-self meaningful one. And I’m steel-manning you strongly here, but I’ll say that the “happy” on the top is also “meaningful” to avoid saying that the HappyX causes Happiness.
We may have distinct usages for the word “fun”. You seem to use it to refer to the Meaningful Life, and I used it almost strictly to refer to Joy. As far as I recall, it is common for different people to systematically refer to happiness by meaning one of the three kinds, and I see no reason for the same not to have happened with “fun” here, specially if you consider how The Fun Sequence barely touches anything resembling flow or joy.
You haven’t shown that sex causes (not just correlates with) any kind of happiness. You are just speculating wildly. Even the weaker version of your claim “sex is fun,” is only sometimes true—sometimes sex is awkward, uncomfortable, frustrating, painful, unsatisfying, etc. So you’re acting like sex is ontologically fun, when of course it isn’t. Crucially, you fail to take into account the fact that the same inhibitions that keep people from having more sex are likely keeping them from having bad sex.
You also write from an entirely atomistic point of view, not even addressing the way our sex behaviors affect society. This is also a sign of the hubris I mentioned.
Allow me to reframe your argument, to illustrate how silly it is:
Eating is fun, and people who have more to eat are happier.
Evolution gave us some inhibitions about eating.
We now have antacids, painkillers, and liposuction to mitigate the harms of overeating.
Therefore we don’t eat enough: we would have more fun if we ate even more.
to a large extent this is completely true. We have cooking, preserving, and nutrition information that keeps food from killing us with disease, indigestion, and allergies. Plenty of people DO eat more food, because we have different built-in hangups about food. Plenty of people get OVER evolutionary disincentives to greater enjoy more varieties of food than they ever would’ve in the natural environment. Spiciness, bitterness, every acquired taste is something people train themselves to enjoy in order to get more fun out of eating because we’ve turned those things from danger signs into pleasant spandrels. Your food argument is actually a perfect support for Diego’s argument as long as you don’t leave out dozens of crucial facts.
People are more promiscuous than we were before birth-control pills/vaccines. Diego claims to know that we are still under-calibrated. There is just no reason to believe this.
Please, stop claiming I’m saying people should be promiscuous. It hurts my primatology reader eyes to read it.
Promiscuous is a name given to species that only have sex without pair-bonding (such as bonobos)
Whereas increasing sex could be done in soo many other ways. 1) More sex with only one partner 2) More partners spread across time 3)More partners spread across space 4) More partners in the same bed at the same time 5) Fewer partners and more sex with each.
I’m tired of this discussion.
Look, there are many claims, no reason to agree with all of them if you don’t want.
Sex is a pleasurable act most times. Evolution made it so by putting nerves in the sex parts that, for instance, cause orgasm.
Most people enjoy having sex.
Sex was more dangerous in the year 334 than it is today in 2013.
Sex was more dangerous year −100 000 than it is today.
Our minds were shaped more intensely for it’s sex related cognition between 2 million years ago, and two hundred years ago, than during the last 200 years.
If you call how much we like sex due to that process “calibration”, you can say that our calibration is more precise for the pre-medicine, pre-condom era, than for today. Were the same pressures and forces acting back then, we would have more, lots more sex than we do now. For a rough, rough approximation, you can keep the fertility rates stable (number of children per woman), but allowing people to use contraceptives. They’d have to have much more sex for the same amount of babies.
The thing for which sex was designed (babies) currently happens much less because of sex. So more sex is a way to “correct” for it. This if you wanted to play evolution’s baby-making game. But no sane being does.
What you want is to have a good life.
So you could mean a life with more flow experience. Well, then, have more sex.
A life with more meaningful experience. Have more deep relationships (which may include more or less sex).
Or a life with more sensorial pleasure (joy). Have more sex. And more massages. More kissing.
Your counterargument mentions social, and emotional things that preclude current humans from having sex with others (remember, more partners is not what I mean’t by more sex) I understood you meant things like jealousy, guilt, fear, and “next-day disgust”. All those things exist in many cultures etc… They are embedded in our original calibration calculation up to a point. For the sake of argument, say 80% were embedded already and we don’t have to worry about them, they do not shift the burden of reason back to me.
So the remaining question is: Are 20% (or however much) of the negative part of the moral/emotional subset of the calibration, which was produced by western civilization and someone’s family and upbringing, enough to say that we over-corrected, are having too much sex, and on average, are suffering because of that. Or at least would suffer, had we more sex.
I think this is unlikely. On average, I’ll say it is nearly impossible. Of course there are people out there, maybe you are one of them, who would do best to reduce their sex lives (either in sheer quantity or number of partners). For some, 0 may be the best amount of sex to live a good life. It doesn’t strike me as obvious that that will be more than a tiny, tiny, tiny minority.
Think about kissing. Kissing is also good, transmit diseases, etc… I’ll bet we kiss more people than your average !kung, and I don’t think we regret doing so. It seems that the same goes for sex.
We have invented lots of sweets, and the same argument (which you made in a funny form) can be made for eating (not overeating as your caricature, but eating more things that taste better than crude non-salted potato). And look at us. Voila, we indeed do cook much better food than was eaten by our paleo-ancestors.
I am all for the health benefits of a paleo-based diet. But I do think that high above in the skyes the ethical judges of the world would look back into the invention of delicious grandma cooking and consider it a good idea that improved life. I think they would also say we did well by kissing more people when populations increased. And they would also say we would do well to have more sex than we do. I’ll see you on judgement day, and we can ask them (Bentham, Singer, and the other Utilitarians who guard the ethics balance) ourselves. Or we can invite a hardcore utilitarian into the conversation and let him do the estimation.
Meanwhile, I”ll have a little bit more sex, you’ll have a litle bit less sex, and both of us, hopefully, will change policy when life stops feeling better because of our adopted policy.
About your “you are assuming sex is ontologically good”. Look, sex is good, I have mentioned that if you ask people how happy they are during activities, sex beats all but conversation with friends in all studies I saw. Check Layard’s “Happiness Lessons from a New Science” for some stats. It is a factual issue, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, then the argument doesn’t follow, and we are done here. If sex is good, then we can go on. Do you truly believe that sex is bad? Is that your true rejection? I have lived 26 years in the same planet as you have, I’ve seen many cultures, and I’ve read hundreds of books. I’m sure I found your claim no more than 3 times. but I’m sure I’ve heard sex being praised as good at least five hundred times. I say that we can say about sex something similar to what we can say against death, paraphrasing Yvain.
Anyone can tell you why sex is good. But it takes a very particular kind of person to tell you why sex may be bad.
You say the sex we are not having may be bad. True. You found a way in which my whole claim can be wrong. If the sex that is being had in the world is good, or very good, but all the counterfactual sex lying in nearby possible worlds sucks, than we are in pretty good shape when it comes to ethical calibration. We should High-five humanity and remain stably in the actual world. Yet all my readings on the metaphysics of possible worlds, by Lewis, Stalnacker, Kripke, Fauconnier never indicated this peculiar metaphysical asymmetry happening.
For this world, the only one in which we can do stats (even though we are not good at it) write “Frequencey” “Happiness” and “Intercourse” on google scholar, you’ll see loads of studies saying that penile vaginal intercourse increases happiness within relationships (the other forms of sex not necessarily). It does so specially when women have orgasm. And this kind of happiness is the Memory self, meaningful one. The only one which has my position in a more dubious role.
I do think that if more sex implied, necessarily, less intensity within one’s relationship, and less sex within one’s relationship, more sex would be bad. Relationships are very, very important for happiness.
But many, many people are single, and more sex would benefit them. Many are in an open relationship, and more sex (even with other people) would benefit them. Many (despite my despise) are in a closed relationship and betray their partners regularly, I have no idea if that benefits them, but would guess that overall it does not, and also doesn’t their partner. Most people live serial relationships and probably more sex would benefit them.
A final point is that what I originally meant by calibration, that has not even begun to enter this debate, is that we are fine tuned to only finding sex with person X acceptable if X possesses qualities Y T U V S. Many of those qualities are fine-tuned for genetic purposes. So when you just want to have intercourse, you are making a bad choice to select against people who have ~Y ~T U V S. The sex would still be good (or the new relationship would still be good), your brain would get used to this ~T ~Y thing, and a person who does not have Y or T (your future partner, wife, husband etc...) would have gained access to having sex with you. An example: As I mentioned, I like women with a good looking upper back, shoulders etc… If I cut off all the other women from my available potential candidates for a wife, girlfriend, date, or one night stand. I’d be super selective, and this would make me reject lots of awesome women who lack this one trait. This seems bad for me and for them.
If I could override that stupid cognition, I’d have more potential mates to select and be selected from.
“Promiscuous” is not a jargon term invented by primatologists, it means “Having many sexual relationships, esp. transient ones.” This is very precisely what you recommend in your post. You shouldn’t insist that people not use words in the way they are commonly used, just because you are used to seeing them in some other context.
Your reading comprehension has failed you yet again. I’ve never argued against having more sex. I’ve just pointed out that the promiscuous transient sexual relationships with multiple partners you recommend don’t actually make people happier (I cited research that points this out in my older posts.) Married people actually have more sex, and they are empirically much happier than the promiscuous singles you encourage people to emulate.
I didn’t say that was the meaning, I just said it hurts my ears, and asked you for a favour. I didn’t recommend what you said I did, as you know.
You can’t be serious that those are the things you choose to respond to, and the rest you choose to ignore. Strawmanning at its worst. You are not (being in this discussion) intellectually honest. I’m out.
You never responded substantively to any of my points, instead just reasserting your speculations as though they were fact. There is no reason for me to keep reiterating the substantive arguments I made, which you never rebutted. Instead, you just kept reasserting your speculative claims as though they were fact.
I assume this is because you can’t actually find any evidence to support your assertions (unlike me, I actually did the research and cited it in my earlier comment.)
He did cite a source and mention where to look for more in his comment.
None of his sources show that increasing promiscuous sex (or even increasing frequency of sex at all) increases happiness.