Posts that do this are usually guilty of inexcusable other-optimizing, and this is no exception. I shouldn’t have to point out the insane hubris of sitting down and writing that, “everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex.”
Did you know there was a long drama about PUA stuff a couple years ago on Less Wrong? I see no reason to restart that pointless drama, especially since these topics are so far out of the comparative advantage of this den of autism.
especially since these topics are so far out of the comparative advantage of this den of autism.
My model is more about diminishing marginal returns on skill development rather than comparative advantage. You can get a lot more stuff done by being able to maintain eye contact than by being better than 99.5% (as opposed to 99%) of people on solving math problems.
You can get a lot more stuff done by being able to maintain eye contact
Unless you’re in the New England area (not all of it, but a substantive portion) where initiating eye contact is considered aggressive and creepy, particularly from a man.
The idea that the New England area has radically different ruels about eye contact seems surprising to me. Could you elaborate how you got that knowledge?
If it’s just personal experience, maybe the way you established eye contact was flawed?
New England guy here. I was surprised when I read OrphanWilde’s comment yesterday; I went out last night and observed. These are the rules most of us follow:
Someone trying to initiate eye contact wants to talk to you—even just “hey, how are ya” or a gesture of acknowledgement like when you pass them on the street. But the eye contact is always a prelude.
If you don’t want to interact, look in their general direction, but not into their eyes. If you do catch their eye, either look away fast or give ’em a nod or make your eyes wide or something.
You get one freebie look when you walk into a room or get on the bus, or when someone pulls up next to you in their car, that sort of thing. Gotta know who’s there.
It feels kind of evasive, I guess, but I don’t believe that in other parts of the world the rules are much different than this. Especially other cities, obeying the meta-rule of “your acknowledgement of a stranger is inversely proportional to the number of other people around.”
I don’t see any connection to aggression, creepiness, or man/woman.
Some examples:
I’m at the store trying to find something. Someone walks up beside me to get something. I ignore them, grab the thing, leave. Eye contact in this situation would be unusual.
Walking past someone on the street. Here eye contact is optional, but mostly avoided. In Boston you generally will not get a response from a greeting anyway, but in Western Mass you will. In Boston people won’t even notice you’re trying to look at them, most of the time, so in those cases a verbal greeting is actually surprising.
I sit down across from you on the train. Take your freebie look if you want it, greeting optional. For the rest of the ride, don’t look into my eyes. The first time you do it, I’ll give you the look-back. The second time, I’ll start a conversation.
Airplane. Completely average to never look into the eyes of your neighbor. But those have people from all over on them.
This matches my experience in several large cities in several different countries, so this is probably a default, not anything peculiar to Boston. And in rural areas people tend to react to eye contact more, regardless of location. Even hikers on a trail do.
This sounds like an exactly correct description of the phenomenon (although when you dismiss the connection to aggression and creepiness, consider the ramifications of somebody -not following these rules-, and even apparently flaunting them, on other people).
It does not describe most other cities in the US, although I suddenly realize that anybody who follows these rules would never notice they weren’t being followed. (Some variant on acknowledgment inverse proportionality to number of people rules are followed, but nowhere else in the nation do people treat eye contact in the transactional manner you seem to here).
Hmm, that’s an interesting observation. I’ve hear people from elsewhere say that something about New Englanders makes us seem “cold” and I wonder if this is the cause.
It’s far more than eye contact. I’m a New Englander who moved to Virginia, I get totally creeped out by people with whom I’m trying to conduct activity of a purely transactional nature (e.g. a real estate agent showing a property) who act with a degree of familiarity that is only considered socially acceptable among actual social relations in New England. They probably think they’re being friendly and I’m oddly cold in response; I think they come off sounding like con artists and need to back the f-ck off,
As another New Englander who moved away, I have a reaction very similar to Prismattic.
I also think of eye contact as aggressive, (and avoid making eye contact for that reason—I expect to come across as creepy) but until five minutes ago I thought that was my personal brain damage, and had never considered that it might be a local-culture thing. I’m not sure if it’s correct, but it’s an interesting idea.
I heard about a study once that found lower rates of autism diagnosis in England than in most other places, and postulated that it was because English culture considers eccentricity more normal. (I can’t vouch for this being true, since I never saw the actual paper, but it would be interesting if it was.) I wonder if New England would show the same pattern.
My methodology doesn’t seem to cause me any issues anywhere else in the country. Lived in southeast, midwest, Texas (which is a region all its own), northwest, and then New England. If my methodology is flawed for the New England area, this is itself suggestive that they have radically different rules. I didn’t notice it in Boston or Rhode Island; it did seem to come up in Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and to some extent New York. New Haven was probably the worst city about it, although it depended pretty heavily on where you were; it wasn’t quite as bad around Yale University.
You might behave differently when you are in New England.
Berlin has in general the reputation for being quite rude. Friends I know who visited Berlin for an event where they felt really good, said that people in Berlin are quite nice. Because they felt good, they smiled more and people were more friendly to them.
I see no reason to restart that pointless drama, especially since these topics are so far out of the comparative advantage of this den of autism.
And we’re off to the level of 4chan. In addition to the casual ableism in this phrase, it also invokes some of the most annoying name-calling currently found on the internet. Ew.
I wasn’t name-calling, Less Wrong’s connection to the autism-spectrum is well understood.
Speaking of name-calling, saying “Ew” is downright juvenile. Was this intentional irony? If you want to respond to me in the future, please try to express yourself with reasoned argument, not whining one-liners.
Okay, so then I guess that was a different kind of ableism from you. Instead of using the word “Autism” as a mere insult along the lines of “nerd”/”neckbeard”/whatever, as seen in the less civil places of the internet, you basically first made a neutral assertion (LW membership correlated with autism spectrum).
But then you sneaked in the implicit assertion that 1) autistic people should be discouraged from discussing sexual and romantic relationships because of their extraordinary ineptitude, etc at such things—and that 2) they’re silly and deluded if they even aspire to collectively learning about such—and, importantly, that 3) “normal” people know better than those weirdoes what’s best for them.
Now replace autistic people with some widely accepted subject of minorities’ rights/”social justice” movements (like blacks in postwar America), and you’ll see how the framework of marginalization is very similar even though its coordinates and scale are different. “Ain’t got nothing against them negroes, we take good care of ’em, they just need to mind their manners, don’t get all uppity and don’t listen to them Commie troublemakers.”
(Plus the negative/perjorative connotations of “den”, often used as an off-handed reminder of an outgroup’s inferiority and otherness. Nobody really says “Den of cool people”, or “den of original thought”, do they?)
P.S. We need a Tumblr-Social-Justice bot in here. Because the thing is, for all the limitations of “social justice” liberal-activist theory, many LWers don’t actually care to understand its epistemic/rationality core, and then get offended when a liberal activist points out how PROBLEMATIC some casual language can be without any malign intent.
When someone calls out tech/econ/”rationality” geeks on some problematic language/framing, applying some basic “social justice” ideas about privilege, othering, etc (maybe not always explaining the reasoning in sufficient detail) - well, immediately a cry about evil totalitarian progressive feminism police goes up… and to me it oddly resembles a dogmatic anti-market Marxist going off the rails when confronted with some equally basic Austrian School criticism like economic calculation, the knowledge problem, and such—for example, here. “NUH UH, talking about privilege and oppression is a silly fad for silly airheads on Tumblr” leaves one epistemically as crippled as “NUH UH, von Mises was a right-wing douchebag beloved of right-wing douchebags.” In place of “capitalist lie machine” LW might use epithets like “moral signaling spiral”, but the basic pattern of pre-emptively mocking Those Insufferable Cranks before they could mess up our tidy little epistemology is there.
They were three words that were perfect for summing up Zach Randolph. Three words that were perfect for describing the Memphis Grizzlies seven games into this NBA season...Former Grizzly Shane Battier had the task of trying to guard Randolph. “I’m a suburban cowboy, didn’t grow up on a farm,” Battier said. “But the closest analogy I can think of is trying to wrestle with a steer. Zach is a strong dude.” That was evident again at OKC as Randolph notched his seventh double-double in as many games (20 points and 11 rebounds before he and Perkins were ejected for their verbal sparring); the Grizzlies won their sixth straight to improve to 6-1 on the season...The morning after the Grizzlies had defeated the Thunder, they even worked their way into the conversation on ESPN’s “First Take” with Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless. Smith called the Grizz “rough and rugged.” He also said, “They don’t try to be pretty. They know who they are … .”...As the Grizzlies were putting away the Heat at FedExForum, the huge video board focused on fans in Heat jerseys leaving early. “I don’t think people are gonna stop being Heat fans,” Gay conceded. “But I think we gained a couple of more fans tonight. We’re kind of under the radar, but teams in the NBA definitely respect us. They don’t take us lightly and I think we kinda enjoy being under the radar. As long as people respect us, that’s all that matters.”
Obviously positive connotations, but if you somehow wanted to dispute that, on the second page I get two Google Books hits for dens of rattlesnakes which is a neutral objective description.
2) I do sincerely believe that evolution made us have sex by making it, and the process leading to it fun. I do believe that humans have intentionally attempted to reduce the risks of having sex. We have in particular invented several kinds of contraceptives, condoms, spermicides, and vaccination with the conscious, deliberate intent of making sex less dangerous. I do believe that, so to say, evolution succeded, and sex is a lot of fun. For everyone. All research in positive psychology indicates that intercourse either tops, or rivals only conversation with friends in amount of experiential happiness. (Gilbert2007, Layard 2004, Lyubuomirsky 2008, Seligman201x). I have no reason, and I mean, no reason which I have ever seen, anywhere, or ever heard, from anyone, reliable or not, to think that we are not under-calibrated for how much fun sex is now, given its reduced level of danger. I would be sad, it is true, if new information came up saying so, and would require lots of evidence. But as far as my mind can reach, I do, sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of humans, regardless of age and gender, would lead better and more pleasureful lives if they had sex more often, with less guilt, with less fear.
3) Removed PUA off from the title. PUA is only related to short-terming males. I find it abusive and asymmetric that the other three quadrants don’t get that much attention, and wanted to say things to the three states that are not short-terming males. I saw the controversy, and thought that a less narrow view of mating could help controversies like that not to happen again.
EDIT: *I do understand the patterns of downvoting and upvoting in all comments and the original post uptill now, all of it. How it was upvoted in the beggining, how slowly the comment that begins with the word “downvoted” rose to the top, thus starting the snowball which as I predicted below in another comment will cause trouble to the post later on.
But I have absolutely no clue why this very comment is being downvoted.
It starts by agreeing that the posts title was bad, and accepting change. It ends by removing PUA, and saying that if anything I wanted to give a broader picture to a narrow vision, which is present in the PUA debate (here as well), and is very undesirable to women (who don’t get any info on what they should do) and to long-terming men.
And in the middle, it is the most sincere and honest explanation of why I felt it is okay to say that people are under-calibrated for sex. No one disagreed with the reasons I gave for it, yet, this comment is being downvoted. If you downvoted it, please, tell me why, I am deeply intrigued. Reasons 1 and 3 don’t exist anymore, and what I did about reason 2 was to explain my feelings and sentiments about it, almost begging for someone to explain to me what is wrong with that statement. Instead of getting an explanation, this comment is being downvoted. I remain intrigued.
I do believe that humans have intentionally attempted to reduce the risks of having sex. We have in particular invented several kinds of contraceptives, condoms, spermicides, and vaccination with the conscious, deliberate intent of making sex less dangerous.
I understood all of that, you were quite clear about this in your post. You think that the danger of sex is biological and that this has been vanquished by vaccines, condoms, etc. In reality, most of the power of sex to harm is social, emotional, and psychological. You are feigning expertise, without even considering the emotional, psychological, and social ramifications. It is pretty common to see this kind of shallow, hyper-atomistic (not considering ramifications upon society), reasoning on Less Wrong.
I do, sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of humans, regardless of age and gender, would lead better and more pleasureful lives if they had sex more often, with less guilt, with less fear.
There is substantialevidence that sexually promiscuous people (distinct from people who have frequent sex) are less happy. It is also a fact that married people have more sex (and more varied sex) than demographically comparable singles. Since married people are also significantly happier and report better health, it seems likely that it is not sex itself* that causes people to be happy, but rather that people who are in stable, happy relationships are also having more sex. Yet your post instead argues that people should just have more sex (including casual sex with strangers, multiple partners, etc.), ignoring the vital element of being in a stable, long-term relationship—in spite of the fact that promiscuity actually is associated with lower happiness. This is inexcusable. Do not give advice about topics when you have such a shallow understanding.
You have not shown this. Perhaps less happy people tend to engage in more promiscuous sex as a way of compensating for their lower happiness. Perhaps there is a common cause of both factors, e.g. excitement seekers might have more promiscuous sex, and also have lower happiness set points due to the same neuro/psych factors that cause them to be excitement seekers.
Students who go to my office hours are generally at slightly below average grades in their class. If someone said that encouraging students to go to office hours was arguing in favor of something associated with lower grades, how would you respond?
If someone proposed that encouraging students to go to office hours was leading to lower grades, I’d try to run a semester with little to no office hours notification/encouragement to see if it held up.
In this specific example, it’s not inconceivable that the lack of office hours would make students more determined to focus during class and seek out other avenues that may prove more useful. I doubt it, but it’s in the realm of reasonable possibility.
I felt like I was trying to help people get what they want, improving instrumental rationality. Long-terming frequently ends up in marriage, monogamous marriage even. More sex doesn’t mean more partners (except when changing from 0 to 1, which is an important transition), and I don’t understand why you think it does.
I personally think that being in a long-term relationship is a very good move for a human who wants to achieve higher levels of happiness. I have been in 4 over the last eight years, and will celebrate 3 years of the current one this Wednesday! :) I’m very glad about both of my longer relationships thus far (both 3 year long).
I most wanted to help Long-terming women and Long-terming men achieve their purposes, whom through the mild levels of autism, or high levels of influence of the PUA community, may have been mistakenly suffering about their prospects and endeavours.
I don’t think that qualifies as promoting promiscuity. (note: I also do not object to promoting promiscuity)
Yeah, good point. I’m feeling addicted to reading and replying to this post now, which obviously is decreasing the signal to noise ratio of the post itself and my and other’s early comments. For the sake of my future self, and my addictive self, I’ll refrain from any further commentaries. (Please if you, reading this, downvoted the one comment which I said eluded me, still explain why, I’m baffled).
I’ll catch up with my Masters now. This semester of experimenting writing on Lesswrong was great.
Thanks to everyone who read this :)
You think that the danger of sex is biological and that this has been vanquished by vaccines, condoms, etc. In reality, most of the power of sex to harm is social, emotional, and psychological.
I think what diegocaleiro is saying is that these social and emotional factors are adaptations that evolved due to the biological dangers. Now that the biological dangers are mostly gone, the adaptations are unnecessary and even harmful. So inasfar as we can consciously influence the social and psychological factors, we would benefit from changing them to promote more sex.
Now that the biological dangers [of sex] are mostly gone
I know that most educated people believe that, but I’ve never seen a good argument for it.
At any rate I am almost sure that there are microbes causing significant amounts of death and disability (especially disability because it is a lot easier for our civilization to ignore or deny a cause of disability than to ignore a cause of deaths) that almost no one recognizes as pathogenic. And I tend to believe that for some significant fraction of these “insufficiently recognized” pathogens the more sexual partners you have, and the more likely you’ll get it. (There are dozens of viral and bacterial infections—including near a dozen at least in the herpes family—that remain in the body and are more common in more promiscuous populations.)
In other words, there seems to be a strong selection bias whereby people tend to look only at the pathogens that are recognized as pathogens by, e.g., doctors.
It might be however that these biological dangers from less-recognized sexually-transmitted pathogens are concentrated in people who are old or already sick.
Any professional biologists or medical researchers wish to chime in?
Except in the specific cases of microbes that target the immune response, wouldn’t you expect to see things like an elevated white blood cell count in patients suffering from a pathogen, even if the specific pathogen was not well recognized or understood? In other words, you would see the symptom in a blood test even if you didn’t know exactly how to look for the pathogen.
If the pathogen reproduces slowly (the pathogen that causes TB might be one such) or has some way of hiding from the immune system or is one of those viruses (e.g., the herpes family) that get into cells and tend to remain dormant for long intervals, then they can be very hard to detect and will certainly not show up in a WBC. I saw news reports earlier this year about evidence that some cases of obesity are caused by gut microbes not previously regarded by, e.g., doctors and society as being pathogenic.
The biggest biological danger of casual sex was (to women) unwanted pregnancy. It’s now almost gone thanks to modern contraception.
STDs certainly exist, but they too have become rarer. Syphilis used to cause a lot of mortality and disability, and was mostly (not entirely) defeated by antibiotics. And with modern health care and social safety nets, if you do get sick, your outlook is much better than even a century ago.
Yes, but our goals are not the goals of evolution. I want to keep sex pleasurable; I don’t want to keep it emotionally and socially complicated and discouraged.
Now that the biological dangers are mostly gone, the adaptations are unnecessary and even harmful. So inasfar as we can consciously influence the social and psychological factors, we would benefit from changing them to promote more sex.
I think that the insofar is probably not, in fact, very far. The psychological mechanisms built up around sex predate the human species, they’re not going to change so easily.
Plus, if increasing promiscuity doesn’t make psychologically modern humans happier, why focus on changing the psychology of modern humans to like being more promiscuous? Aren’t we privileging the question with respect to sex here? Why not spend that time and effort focusing on making people enjoy cheaper, more sustainably produced foods? How about changing our standards of humor so it’s easier to satisfy people with cheesy sitcoms? Is making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful psychological alteration we could be making?
I think that the insofar is probably not, in fact, very far. The psychological mechanisms built up around sex predate the human species, they’re not going to change so easily.
Well, other humans societies are known to be more relaxed and permissive about sex than the modern Western world. And that’s without effective contraception. So we clearly can improve somewhat.
Is making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful psychological alteration we could be making?
No. But down that road lies the argument of “invest all your effort in the single most efficient charity to the exclusion of everything else”. Most people don’t actually do this, so it makes sense to talk about other things too.
The suggestion here is that making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful alteration we could be making with regard to promiscuity. Maybe one of the most helpful alterations with regard to sex in general.
Well, other humans societies are known to be more relaxed and permissive about sex than the modern Western world. And that’s without effective contraception. So we clearly can improve somewhat.
Does it make them happier? How do we know this actually constitutes an improvement?
ETA: We would have evolved different psychological mechanisms around sex if the biological and ecological conditions around it had been different millions of years ago, but those psychological mechanisms are adaptations for our genetic continuation, not our happiness. Just because we’ve got safer, lower consequence access to sex than in our ancestral environment, does not necessarily mean we’d be happier if we adapted to use that access to a fuller extent.
No. But down that road lies the argument of “invest all your effort in the single most efficient charity to the exclusion of everything else”. Most people don’t actually do this, so it makes sense to talk about other things too.
We don’t want to go down the road of “invest your money in the Society for Prevention of Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies” either. Lots of people do that, but that doesn’t make it sensible.
There’s a big difference between becoming polyamorous and simply increasing promiscuity. The people who wrote those are in stable relationships with people they’re happy with. Neither was in such a relationship prior to polyhacking.
I think that the insofar is probably not, in fact, very far. The psychological mechanisms built up around sex predate the human species, they’re not going to change so easily.
People have claimed that religion is part of human nature, too, and yet nowadays a very large fraction of the population in Europe and Japan is non-religious. How sure are you that the chain can still hold you? BTW, the regular LWers who wrote about switching to polyamory don’t seem to regret that.
A large fraction of the population in Europe and Japan may not be members of organized religion, but (from personal experience in Europe, secondhand in Japan,) they still engage in plenty of tribal and faith-based reasoning.
This is something I do think can be changed, but with very great difficulty. Similarly the mechanisms around sex, but those are probably a great deal older, and likely even more entrenched.
You can see my other comment re: polyhacking. On an added note, I find it doubtful that the entire population would find it effective. Some people are dramatically more afflicted by sexual jealousy than others. Similarly, some people have reported a measure of success with bi-hacking, but when I tried it it simply didn’t work.
I do sincerely believe that evolution made us have sex by making it, and the process leading to it fun. I do believe that humans have intentionally attempted to reduce the risks of having sex. We have in particular invented several kinds of contraceptives, condoms, spermicides, and vaccination with the conscious, deliberate intent of making sex less dangerous. I do believe that, so to say, evolution succeded, and sex is a lot of fun. For everyone. All research in positive psychology indicates that intercourse either tops, or rivals only conversation with friends in amount of experiential happiness. (Gilbert2007, Layard 2004, Lyubuomirsky 2008, Seligman201x). I have no reason, and I mean, no reason which I have ever seen, anywhere, or ever heard, from anyone, reliable or not, to think that we are not under-calibrated for how much fun sex is now, given its reduced level of danger. I would be sad, it is true, if new information came up saying so, and would require lots of evidence. But as far as my mind can reach, I do, sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of humans, regardless of age and gender, would lead better and more pleasureful lives if they had sex more often, with less guilt, with less fear.
In what sense is sex under-calibrated? From the point of view of evolution enjoying condomed sex at all is a flaw. If you’re reply to this is something along the lines of “screw the blind idiot god, I enjoy sex and I’m not care that it’s not adaptive” you are left with the question of why you identify with the preference for sex but not with all the associated guilt, value of chastity, etc.? If your reply is that you get more pleasure this way, why not cut out the middleman and go directly to wire heading?
If you’re reply is that you get more pleasure this way, why not cut out the middleman and go directly to wire heading?
This is why the noncentral fallacy really deserves the title of the Worst Argument In The World. If [abortion], why not [murdering retarded people]? If [taxation], why not [slavery]?
(Also, “YOUR/YOU’RE”! What the hell’s up with that, I don’t understand how native English speakers can confuse those at all, never mind so frequently.)
(Also, “YOUR/YOU’RE”! What the hell’s up with that, I don’t understand how native English speakers can confuse those at all, never mind so frequently.)
I tend to assume that it’s a typo when I see someone confuse them, unless that person makes lots of other similar errors.
What the hell’s up with that, I don’t understand how native English speakers can confuse those at all, never mind so frequently.
In most present-day accents of English they’re homophones, and it’s not uncommon for people to accidentally mixing homophones up when typing quickly in a language they hear on a daily base. (When I went to Ireland, the frequency at which I made such brain farts in English increased by an order of magnitude within a few weeks.) OTOH, personally most of the times I realize that I’ve accidentally typed the wrong word within seconds of typing it, and much of the rest of the time I catch it while proof-reading myself.
This is not the noncentral fallacy. This is me pointing out that the hypothetical argument I’m responding to proves too much.
Basically the problem with arguments of the form doing X gives pleasure therefore we should do more X, is that the same argument applies to wireheading. If you have no better reply than wireheading seems ewe and X doesn’t, keep in mind that your intuitions about what is ewe change depending on what you do.
There are possibilities other than “we should maximize our inclusive genetic fitness” and “we should maximize our hedonic pleasure”. Thou art godshatter.
By your reasoning, it would follow that we should keep all our preferences just as they are and never change them. But actually we have many reasons to want to change (other) preferences that we consider valid.
For example, we want to reduce violence and war. We want to reduce overeating in the presence of food superstimulus. We want to be attracted to and happy with average human partners in the presence of media-sponsored super-beautiful models. We want to reduce religiosity (although this is more controversial among humans). We want to reduce akrasia, which derives in part from time-discounting of preferences. We want to eliminate various biases.
All these things are places where we want to go against our evolutionary preferences. At the very least we support one preference over another. And similarly, I support and wish to increase the preference for sex over the preference for modesty, chastity, and sexual guilt and shame.
Reasons 1 and 3 don’t exist anymore, and what I did about reason 2 was to explain my feelings and sentiments about it, almost begging for someone to explain to me what is wrong with that statement. Instead of getting an explanation, this comment is being downvoted. I remain intrigued.
I explained what I consider wrong about this in my comment dated 06 May 2013 at 07:22:44PM. The short version is:
You consider humanity to be “under-calibrated for sex” for woefully inadequate reasons. You recommend more sex, (including promiscuous sex with near-strangers) without establishing that sex itself leads to sustained happiness, as opposed to being in a stable, long-term relationship (people in such relationships also have more sex.) To make this clear, in the diagram below, the left is my position, the right is your position.
My position does a better job of explaining the correlation between sex and happiness, while also explaining why people why promiscuous people are not enjoying the happiness of people in stable relationships.
You fail to consider the social, emotional, and psychological reasons why people are hesitant to engage in promiscuous sex. Desrtopa does an good job of explaining a part of this.
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.)
False dichotomy—there might be arrows from “relationship” to “sex”, from “relationship” to “happiness” and from “sex” to “happiness”—and some of those might even be double-headed.
(If there was no arrow from “sex” to “happiness”, you could take 100 random couples, tell 50 of them at random to not have sex for six months, and those won’t be any less happy than the other 50. I’m not sure that’s what would happen.)
False dichotomy—there might be arrows from “relationship” to “sex”, from “relationship” to “happiness” and from “sex” to “happiness”—and some of those might even be double-headed.
That diagram is to illustrate the difference between my explanation of the research showing a positive correlation between sex and happiness and Diego’s. I’m obviously not claiming these are the only possible relationships between sex and happiness. I’m not sure if you’re being deliberately obtuse or just not paying much attention.
If there was no arrow from “sex” to “happiness”, you could take 100 random couples, tell 50 of them at random to not have sex for six months, and those won’t be any less happy than the other 50.
This experiment is totally irrelevant to the disagreement between Diego and myself. Diego is claiming that making yourself have more sex—including sex you would otherwise be reluctant to have—will make you happier. He says he knows this because of some conjecture based on an ev-psych just-so story. Your experiment tests whether forcing people not to have sex they already do want to have will make them less happy. Do you not understand the difference?
This experiment is totally irrelevant to the disagreement between Diego and myself. Diego is claiming that making yourself have more sex—including sex you would otherwise be reluctant to have—will make you happier. He says he knows this because of some conjecture based on an ev-psych just-so story. Your experiment tests whether forcing people not to have sex they already do want to have will make them less happy. Do you not understand the difference?
If having epsilon much less sex would make us less happy, then having epsilon much more sex would make us happier, unless we are at exactly the local optimum, which sounds unlikely a priori.
If having epsilon much less sex would make us less happy, then having epsilon much more sex would make us happier, unless we are at exactly the local optimum, which sounds unlikely a priori.
Human preference doesn’t consider gains and losses symmetrically. We are dramatically more sensitive to losses than to gains.
By some popular metrics, sex acts are discrete (if not always discreet), not continuous: you can’t have epsilon more sex acts; you can have one more sex act.
It seems pretty plausible that we might be somewhere near the local optimum, or more precisely that most couples are somewhere near their optimum. (I see no reason to think that different couples’ optima are in the same place, or that everyone’s on the same side of their optimum.)
You’re now talking about epsilons, whereas your thought experiment involved getting couples to not have any sex at all for six months. That’s a pretty big epsilon. [EDITED to add, for clarity: If instead you asked these couples to skip sex on 10% of candidate occasions in the next six months, or to try to have 10% more than they’d otherwise have had, I don’t think it’s at all obvious what to expect in either case.]
So far as I can see, no one is claiming that there is no causal relationship between sex and happiness; only that the observed correlation between sex and happiness may be largely the result of a different combination of causal relationships. In particular, it seems somewhat plausible that the following might all be true. (a) Any given person, in any given relationship situation, has a rough optimum level of sexual activity. The same goes for any particular couple. (b) Deviating far from that level tends to make people less happy. (c) Being in a stable, well-functioning romantic relationship generally tends to make people happier, to increase their optimum amount of sex, and to make them have more sex. (d) People and couples tend to adjust to roughly their optimum amount of sex. If these are true, then there will be a correlation between sex and happiness because of (b), but for any given person or couple to increase the amount of sex they have might be counterproductive because of (d). And if these are true, then your thought experiment will have the outcome you predict. (Note: Everything about “couples” in this paragraph should be taken also to cover larger groups of people who have sex with one another.)
If having epsilon much less sex would make us less happy, then having epsilon much more sex would make us happier, unless we are at exactly the local optimum, which sounds unlikely a priori.
Asr is right, but it actually goes so much further than this.… You have also entirely failed to account for opportunity cost. You aren’t just adding some epsilon of sex, you’re subtracting from some other area of life to have more time for sex.
And these are just the abstract, theoretical problems with your suggestion. The real-world practical problems of adding more sex are enormous… There are serious bottlenecks to sex. Both partners have to be in the mood or the act has potentially serious negative utility. Synchronizing desire takes a lot of time and effort. (It takes much more than a minute of romance time to yield a minute of sex.)
“The rationalist’s guide to rationally using “rational” in rational post titles”: People like to place the word “rational” in front of a title to cloak the fact that it isn’t actually relevant to Less Wrong’s topic.
But this post does say ‘use your System 2 even in a situation where most people rely on their System 1 alone and you’d be tempted to do the same’, so it wasn’t just an empty applause light in this case.
Posts that do this are usually guilty of inexcusable other-optimizing, and this is no exception. I shouldn’t have to point out the insane hubris of sitting down and writing that, “everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex.”
Huh. The advice in the post sounded fairly non-specific to me; most of the readers will probably find at least some of it that applies to them.
EDIT: the following is based on a misunderstanding of what knb meant, and maybe I should stop making several points in the same comment, even though it’d clutter Recent Comments, so that I can retract each of them individually.
Did you know there was a long drama about PUA stuff a couple years ago on Less Wrong? I see no reason to restart that pointless drama, especially since these topics are so far out of the comparative advantage of this den of autism.
Comparative advantage doesn’t apply to things you can’t trade; if I am good at (say) physics but mediocre at mating and you’re mediocre at physics but good at mating, there’s no way I can give you one unit of physics in exchange of one unit of mating. IOW, what ThrustVectoring said.
Comparative advantage doesn’t apply to things you can’t trade; if I am good at (say) physics but mediocre at mating and you’re mediocre at physics but good at mating, there’s no way I can give you one unit of physics in exchange of one unit of mating. IOW, what ThrustVectoring said.
I obviously am not saying you can trade “mating.” However, you can get relationship advice from other sources. I’m surprised that you don’t understand the distinction.
Less Wrong folks tend to be good at writing and thinking about some things, like Newcomb’s problem, epistemic rationality, and decision theories, and not terribly good at giving advice in other areas. Less Wrong is, if anything, a bit on the left side of the bell curve of social intelligence. It doesn’t make sense for Less Wrong to try to specialize in relationship advice any more than it makes sense for us to start writing posts about auto repair or body building. There are other places for those topics. Less Wrong isn’t the only place to try to talk about these things, and we aren’t the best people to advise or seek advice from on many topics.
Downvoted for the following reasons:
“The rationalist’s guide to rationally using “rational” in rational post titles”: People like to place the word “rational” in front of a title to cloak the fact that it isn’t actually relevant to Less Wrong’s topic.
Posts that do this are usually guilty of inexcusable other-optimizing, and this is no exception. I shouldn’t have to point out the insane hubris of sitting down and writing that, “everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex.”
Did you know there was a long drama about PUA stuff a couple years ago on Less Wrong? I see no reason to restart that pointless drama, especially since these topics are so far out of the comparative advantage of this den of autism.
My model is more about diminishing marginal returns on skill development rather than comparative advantage. You can get a lot more stuff done by being able to maintain eye contact than by being better than 99.5% (as opposed to 99%) of people on solving math problems.
Unless you’re in the New England area (not all of it, but a substantive portion) where initiating eye contact is considered aggressive and creepy, particularly from a man.
The idea that the New England area has radically different ruels about eye contact seems surprising to me. Could you elaborate how you got that knowledge?
If it’s just personal experience, maybe the way you established eye contact was flawed?
New England guy here. I was surprised when I read OrphanWilde’s comment yesterday; I went out last night and observed. These are the rules most of us follow:
Someone trying to initiate eye contact wants to talk to you—even just “hey, how are ya” or a gesture of acknowledgement like when you pass them on the street. But the eye contact is always a prelude.
If you don’t want to interact, look in their general direction, but not into their eyes. If you do catch their eye, either look away fast or give ’em a nod or make your eyes wide or something.
You get one freebie look when you walk into a room or get on the bus, or when someone pulls up next to you in their car, that sort of thing. Gotta know who’s there.
It feels kind of evasive, I guess, but I don’t believe that in other parts of the world the rules are much different than this. Especially other cities, obeying the meta-rule of “your acknowledgement of a stranger is inversely proportional to the number of other people around.”
I don’t see any connection to aggression, creepiness, or man/woman.
Some examples:
I’m at the store trying to find something. Someone walks up beside me to get something. I ignore them, grab the thing, leave. Eye contact in this situation would be unusual.
Walking past someone on the street. Here eye contact is optional, but mostly avoided. In Boston you generally will not get a response from a greeting anyway, but in Western Mass you will. In Boston people won’t even notice you’re trying to look at them, most of the time, so in those cases a verbal greeting is actually surprising.
I sit down across from you on the train. Take your freebie look if you want it, greeting optional. For the rest of the ride, don’t look into my eyes. The first time you do it, I’ll give you the look-back. The second time, I’ll start a conversation.
Airplane. Completely average to never look into the eyes of your neighbor. But those have people from all over on them.
This matches my experience in several large cities in several different countries, so this is probably a default, not anything peculiar to Boston. And in rural areas people tend to react to eye contact more, regardless of location. Even hikers on a trail do.
This sounds like an exactly correct description of the phenomenon (although when you dismiss the connection to aggression and creepiness, consider the ramifications of somebody -not following these rules-, and even apparently flaunting them, on other people).
It does not describe most other cities in the US, although I suddenly realize that anybody who follows these rules would never notice they weren’t being followed. (Some variant on acknowledgment inverse proportionality to number of people rules are followed, but nowhere else in the nation do people treat eye contact in the transactional manner you seem to here).
Hmm, that’s an interesting observation. I’ve hear people from elsewhere say that something about New Englanders makes us seem “cold” and I wonder if this is the cause.
It’s far more than eye contact. I’m a New Englander who moved to Virginia, I get totally creeped out by people with whom I’m trying to conduct activity of a purely transactional nature (e.g. a real estate agent showing a property) who act with a degree of familiarity that is only considered socially acceptable among actual social relations in New England. They probably think they’re being friendly and I’m oddly cold in response; I think they come off sounding like con artists and need to back the f-ck off,
As another New Englander who moved away, I have a reaction very similar to Prismattic.
I also think of eye contact as aggressive, (and avoid making eye contact for that reason—I expect to come across as creepy) but until five minutes ago I thought that was my personal brain damage, and had never considered that it might be a local-culture thing. I’m not sure if it’s correct, but it’s an interesting idea.
I heard about a study once that found lower rates of autism diagnosis in England than in most other places, and postulated that it was because English culture considers eccentricity more normal. (I can’t vouch for this being true, since I never saw the actual paper, but it would be interesting if it was.) I wonder if New England would show the same pattern.
My methodology doesn’t seem to cause me any issues anywhere else in the country. Lived in southeast, midwest, Texas (which is a region all its own), northwest, and then New England. If my methodology is flawed for the New England area, this is itself suggestive that they have radically different rules. I didn’t notice it in Boston or Rhode Island; it did seem to come up in Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and to some extent New York. New Haven was probably the worst city about it, although it depended pretty heavily on where you were; it wasn’t quite as bad around Yale University.
You might behave differently when you are in New England.
Berlin has in general the reputation for being quite rude. Friends I know who visited Berlin for an event where they felt really good, said that people in Berlin are quite nice. Because they felt good, they smiled more and people were more friendly to them.
I probably should have generalized to social skills in general (like, for example, maintaining eye contact as appropriate). Thanks.
And we’re off to the level of 4chan. In addition to the casual ableism in this phrase, it also invokes some of the most annoying name-calling currently found on the internet. Ew.
I wasn’t name-calling, Less Wrong’s connection to the autism-spectrum is well understood.
Speaking of name-calling, saying “Ew” is downright juvenile. Was this intentional irony? If you want to respond to me in the future, please try to express yourself with reasoned argument, not whining one-liners.
Okay, so then I guess that was a different kind of ableism from you. Instead of using the word “Autism” as a mere insult along the lines of “nerd”/”neckbeard”/whatever, as seen in the less civil places of the internet, you basically first made a neutral assertion (LW membership correlated with autism spectrum).
But then you sneaked in the implicit assertion that 1) autistic people should be discouraged from discussing sexual and romantic relationships because of their extraordinary ineptitude, etc at such things—and that 2) they’re silly and deluded if they even aspire to collectively learning about such—and, importantly, that 3) “normal” people know better than those weirdoes what’s best for them.
Now replace autistic people with some widely accepted subject of minorities’ rights/”social justice” movements (like blacks in postwar America), and you’ll see how the framework of marginalization is very similar even though its coordinates and scale are different. “Ain’t got nothing against them negroes, we take good care of ’em, they just need to mind their manners, don’t get all uppity and don’t listen to them Commie troublemakers.”
(Plus the negative/perjorative connotations of “den”, often used as an off-handed reminder of an outgroup’s inferiority and otherness. Nobody really says “Den of cool people”, or “den of original thought”, do they?)
P.S. We need a Tumblr-Social-Justice bot in here. Because the thing is, for all the limitations of “social justice” liberal-activist theory, many LWers don’t actually care to understand its epistemic/rationality core, and then get offended when a liberal activist points out how PROBLEMATIC some casual language can be without any malign intent.
When someone calls out tech/econ/”rationality” geeks on some problematic language/framing, applying some basic “social justice” ideas about privilege, othering, etc (maybe not always explaining the reasoning in sufficient detail) - well, immediately a cry about evil totalitarian progressive feminism police goes up… and to me it oddly resembles a dogmatic anti-market Marxist going off the rails when confronted with some equally basic Austrian School criticism like economic calculation, the knowledge problem, and such—for example, here. “NUH UH, talking about privilege and oppression is a silly fad for silly airheads on Tumblr” leaves one epistemically as crippled as “NUH UH, von Mises was a right-wing douchebag beloved of right-wing douchebags.” In place of “capitalist lie machine” LW might use epithets like “moral signaling spiral”, but the basic pattern of pre-emptively mocking Those Insufferable Cranks before they could mess up our tidy little epistemology is there.
P.P.S. Wow, I accidentally up a meta level.
Wow, you tumblr social justice warrior types are really good at having meltdowns. You even put the word “problematic” in all caps. 10⁄10
You might like to click the link.
I challenge you to find an example of someone saying “this den of X” where X does not have a negative connotation.
Challenge accepted. Elapsed time: 5 seconds.
I present to you the fourth hit in Google for “this den of “: http://www.memphisdailynews.com/news/2012/nov/15/this-den-of-grizzlies-players-doesnt-bluff/ “This Den of Grizzlies Players Doesn’t Bluff”
Obviously positive connotations, but if you somehow wanted to dispute that, on the second page I get two Google Books hits for dens of rattlesnakes which is a neutral objective description.
Imagine a frequent commenter on a liberal forum referring to his online hangout as “this den of commies.”
It was intended to be ironic exaggeration and self-deprecation (I’ve been on LW since the beginning).
I believe your intention, just as I believe it was not possible to divine this intention from the original post.
I bet most people did get it, but it is understandable that some did not. Mea culpa.
1) Agreed, I’m truly sorry, title changed.
2) I do sincerely believe that evolution made us have sex by making it, and the process leading to it fun. I do believe that humans have intentionally attempted to reduce the risks of having sex. We have in particular invented several kinds of contraceptives, condoms, spermicides, and vaccination with the conscious, deliberate intent of making sex less dangerous. I do believe that, so to say, evolution succeded, and sex is a lot of fun. For everyone. All research in positive psychology indicates that intercourse either tops, or rivals only conversation with friends in amount of experiential happiness. (Gilbert2007, Layard 2004, Lyubuomirsky 2008, Seligman201x). I have no reason, and I mean, no reason which I have ever seen, anywhere, or ever heard, from anyone, reliable or not, to think that we are not under-calibrated for how much fun sex is now, given its reduced level of danger. I would be sad, it is true, if new information came up saying so, and would require lots of evidence. But as far as my mind can reach, I do, sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of humans, regardless of age and gender, would lead better and more pleasureful lives if they had sex more often, with less guilt, with less fear.
3) Removed PUA off from the title. PUA is only related to short-terming males. I find it abusive and asymmetric that the other three quadrants don’t get that much attention, and wanted to say things to the three states that are not short-terming males. I saw the controversy, and thought that a less narrow view of mating could help controversies like that not to happen again.
EDIT: *I do understand the patterns of downvoting and upvoting in all comments and the original post uptill now, all of it. How it was upvoted in the beggining, how slowly the comment that begins with the word “downvoted” rose to the top, thus starting the snowball which as I predicted below in another comment will cause trouble to the post later on.
But I have absolutely no clue why this very comment is being downvoted.
It starts by agreeing that the posts title was bad, and accepting change. It ends by removing PUA, and saying that if anything I wanted to give a broader picture to a narrow vision, which is present in the PUA debate (here as well), and is very undesirable to women (who don’t get any info on what they should do) and to long-terming men. And in the middle, it is the most sincere and honest explanation of why I felt it is okay to say that people are under-calibrated for sex. No one disagreed with the reasons I gave for it, yet, this comment is being downvoted. If you downvoted it, please, tell me why, I am deeply intrigued. Reasons 1 and 3 don’t exist anymore, and what I did about reason 2 was to explain my feelings and sentiments about it, almost begging for someone to explain to me what is wrong with that statement. Instead of getting an explanation, this comment is being downvoted. I remain intrigued.
I understood all of that, you were quite clear about this in your post. You think that the danger of sex is biological and that this has been vanquished by vaccines, condoms, etc. In reality, most of the power of sex to harm is social, emotional, and psychological. You are feigning expertise, without even considering the emotional, psychological, and social ramifications. It is pretty common to see this kind of shallow, hyper-atomistic (not considering ramifications upon society), reasoning on Less Wrong.
There is substantial evidence that sexually promiscuous people (distinct from people who have frequent sex) are less happy. It is also a fact that married people have more sex (and more varied sex) than demographically comparable singles. Since married people are also significantly happier and report better health, it seems likely that it is not sex itself* that causes people to be happy, but rather that people who are in stable, happy relationships are also having more sex. Yet your post instead argues that people should just have more sex (including casual sex with strangers, multiple partners, etc.), ignoring the vital element of being in a stable, long-term relationship—in spite of the fact that promiscuity actually is associated with lower happiness. This is inexcusable. Do not give advice about topics when you have such a shallow understanding.
You have not shown this. Perhaps less happy people tend to engage in more promiscuous sex as a way of compensating for their lower happiness. Perhaps there is a common cause of both factors, e.g. excitement seekers might have more promiscuous sex, and also have lower happiness set points due to the same neuro/psych factors that cause them to be excitement seekers.
Fair enough, although the overall point still stands. He is arguing in favor of promiscuity, something associated with lower happiness.
Students who go to my office hours are generally at slightly below average grades in their class. If someone said that encouraging students to go to office hours was arguing in favor of something associated with lower grades, how would you respond?
If someone proposed that encouraging students to go to office hours was leading to lower grades, I’d try to run a semester with little to no office hours notification/encouragement to see if it held up.
In this specific example, it’s not inconceivable that the lack of office hours would make students more determined to focus during class and seek out other avenues that may prove more useful. I doubt it, but it’s in the realm of reasonable possibility.
I felt like I was trying to help people get what they want, improving instrumental rationality. Long-terming frequently ends up in marriage, monogamous marriage even. More sex doesn’t mean more partners (except when changing from 0 to 1, which is an important transition), and I don’t understand why you think it does.
I personally think that being in a long-term relationship is a very good move for a human who wants to achieve higher levels of happiness. I have been in 4 over the last eight years, and will celebrate 3 years of the current one this Wednesday! :) I’m very glad about both of my longer relationships thus far (both 3 year long).
I most wanted to help Long-terming women and Long-terming men achieve their purposes, whom through the mild levels of autism, or high levels of influence of the PUA community, may have been mistakenly suffering about their prospects and endeavours.
I don’t think that qualifies as promoting promiscuity. (note: I also do not object to promoting promiscuity)
Careful, this is a good way to get people addicted to superstimuli.
Yeah, good point. I’m feeling addicted to reading and replying to this post now, which obviously is decreasing the signal to noise ratio of the post itself and my and other’s early comments. For the sake of my future self, and my addictive self, I’ll refrain from any further commentaries. (Please if you, reading this, downvoted the one comment which I said eluded me, still explain why, I’m baffled).
I’ll catch up with my Masters now. This semester of experimenting writing on Lesswrong was great. Thanks to everyone who read this :)
I think what diegocaleiro is saying is that these social and emotional factors are adaptations that evolved due to the biological dangers. Now that the biological dangers are mostly gone, the adaptations are unnecessary and even harmful. So inasfar as we can consciously influence the social and psychological factors, we would benefit from changing them to promote more sex.
I know that most educated people believe that, but I’ve never seen a good argument for it.
At any rate I am almost sure that there are microbes causing significant amounts of death and disability (especially disability because it is a lot easier for our civilization to ignore or deny a cause of disability than to ignore a cause of deaths) that almost no one recognizes as pathogenic. And I tend to believe that for some significant fraction of these “insufficiently recognized” pathogens the more sexual partners you have, and the more likely you’ll get it. (There are dozens of viral and bacterial infections—including near a dozen at least in the herpes family—that remain in the body and are more common in more promiscuous populations.)
In other words, there seems to be a strong selection bias whereby people tend to look only at the pathogens that are recognized as pathogens by, e.g., doctors.
It might be however that these biological dangers from less-recognized sexually-transmitted pathogens are concentrated in people who are old or already sick.
Any professional biologists or medical researchers wish to chime in?
I’m not a medical professional either, but...
Except in the specific cases of microbes that target the immune response, wouldn’t you expect to see things like an elevated white blood cell count in patients suffering from a pathogen, even if the specific pathogen was not well recognized or understood? In other words, you would see the symptom in a blood test even if you didn’t know exactly how to look for the pathogen.
If the pathogen reproduces slowly (the pathogen that causes TB might be one such) or has some way of hiding from the immune system or is one of those viruses (e.g., the herpes family) that get into cells and tend to remain dormant for long intervals, then they can be very hard to detect and will certainly not show up in a WBC. I saw news reports earlier this year about evidence that some cases of obesity are caused by gut microbes not previously regarded by, e.g., doctors and society as being pathogenic.
The biggest biological danger of casual sex was (to women) unwanted pregnancy. It’s now almost gone thanks to modern contraception.
STDs certainly exist, but they too have become rarer. Syphilis used to cause a lot of mortality and disability, and was mostly (not entirely) defeated by antibiotics. And with modern health care and social safety nets, if you do get sick, your outlook is much better than even a century ago.
So are the adaptations that make sex as pleasurable as it is.
Yes, but our goals are not the goals of evolution. I want to keep sex pleasurable; I don’t want to keep it emotionally and socially complicated and discouraged.
Thanks Dan, you made the Evolutionary Heuristic Point very clear in this and other comments!
See my more detailed discussion here.
Replied there.
I think that the insofar is probably not, in fact, very far. The psychological mechanisms built up around sex predate the human species, they’re not going to change so easily.
Plus, if increasing promiscuity doesn’t make psychologically modern humans happier, why focus on changing the psychology of modern humans to like being more promiscuous? Aren’t we privileging the question with respect to sex here? Why not spend that time and effort focusing on making people enjoy cheaper, more sustainably produced foods? How about changing our standards of humor so it’s easier to satisfy people with cheesy sitcoms? Is making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful psychological alteration we could be making?
Well, other humans societies are known to be more relaxed and permissive about sex than the modern Western world. And that’s without effective contraception. So we clearly can improve somewhat.
No. But down that road lies the argument of “invest all your effort in the single most efficient charity to the exclusion of everything else”. Most people don’t actually do this, so it makes sense to talk about other things too.
The suggestion here is that making people more adapted to promiscuity the most helpful alteration we could be making with regard to promiscuity. Maybe one of the most helpful alterations with regard to sex in general.
Really, since most of the societies I can think of are a lot more restrictive.
Most are, but some (few?) are more permissive. I can’t remember the right examples, though; I could find them if you’re not aware of any examples.
Does it make them happier? How do we know this actually constitutes an improvement?
ETA: We would have evolved different psychological mechanisms around sex if the biological and ecological conditions around it had been different millions of years ago, but those psychological mechanisms are adaptations for our genetic continuation, not our happiness. Just because we’ve got safer, lower consequence access to sex than in our ancestral environment, does not necessarily mean we’d be happier if we adapted to use that access to a fuller extent.
We don’t want to go down the road of “invest your money in the Society for Prevention of Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies” either. Lots of people do that, but that doesn’t make it sensible.
By listening to the people who tried it?
Possible selection bias.
There’s a big difference between becoming polyamorous and simply increasing promiscuity. The people who wrote those are in stable relationships with people they’re happy with. Neither was in such a relationship prior to polyhacking.
People have claimed that religion is part of human nature, too, and yet nowadays a very large fraction of the population in Europe and Japan is non-religious. How sure are you that the chain can still hold you? BTW, the regular LWers who wrote about switching to polyamory don’t seem to regret that.
A large fraction of the population in Europe and Japan may not be members of organized religion, but (from personal experience in Europe, secondhand in Japan,) they still engage in plenty of tribal and faith-based reasoning.
This is something I do think can be changed, but with very great difficulty. Similarly the mechanisms around sex, but those are probably a great deal older, and likely even more entrenched.
You can see my other comment re: polyhacking. On an added note, I find it doubtful that the entire population would find it effective. Some people are dramatically more afflicted by sexual jealousy than others. Similarly, some people have reported a measure of success with bi-hacking, but when I tried it it simply didn’t work.
In what sense is sex under-calibrated? From the point of view of evolution enjoying condomed sex at all is a flaw. If you’re reply to this is something along the lines of “screw the blind idiot god, I enjoy sex and I’m not care that it’s not adaptive” you are left with the question of why you identify with the preference for sex but not with all the associated guilt, value of chastity, etc.? If your reply is that you get more pleasure this way, why not cut out the middleman and go directly to wire heading?
This is why the noncentral fallacy really deserves the title of the Worst Argument In The World. If [abortion], why not [murdering retarded people]? If [taxation], why not [slavery]?
(Also, “YOUR/YOU’RE”! What the hell’s up with that, I don’t understand how native English speakers can confuse those at all, never mind so frequently.)
I tend to assume that it’s a typo when I see someone confuse them, unless that person makes lots of other similar errors.
In most present-day accents of English they’re homophones, and it’s not uncommon for people to accidentally mixing homophones up when typing quickly in a language they hear on a daily base. (When I went to Ireland, the frequency at which I made such brain farts in English increased by an order of magnitude within a few weeks.) OTOH, personally most of the times I realize that I’ve accidentally typed the wrong word within seconds of typing it, and much of the rest of the time I catch it while proof-reading myself.
This is not the noncentral fallacy. This is me pointing out that the hypothetical argument I’m responding to proves too much.
Basically the problem with arguments of the form doing X gives pleasure therefore we should do more X, is that the same argument applies to wireheading. If you have no better reply than wireheading seems ewe and X doesn’t, keep in mind that your intuitions about what is ewe change depending on what you do.
There are possibilities other than “we should maximize our inclusive genetic fitness” and “we should maximize our hedonic pleasure”. Thou art godshatter.
I know, I was objecting to diegocaleiro providing no argument for his position beyond a somewhat confused combination of these two.
By your reasoning, it would follow that we should keep all our preferences just as they are and never change them. But actually we have many reasons to want to change (other) preferences that we consider valid.
For example, we want to reduce violence and war. We want to reduce overeating in the presence of food superstimulus. We want to be attracted to and happy with average human partners in the presence of media-sponsored super-beautiful models. We want to reduce religiosity (although this is more controversial among humans). We want to reduce akrasia, which derives in part from time-discounting of preferences. We want to eliminate various biases.
All these things are places where we want to go against our evolutionary preferences. At the very least we support one preference over another. And similarly, I support and wish to increase the preference for sex over the preference for modesty, chastity, and sexual guilt and shame.
I explained what I consider wrong about this in my comment dated 06 May 2013 at 07:22:44PM. The short version is:
You consider humanity to be “under-calibrated for sex” for woefully inadequate reasons. You recommend more sex, (including promiscuous sex with near-strangers) without establishing that sex itself leads to sustained happiness, as opposed to being in a stable, long-term relationship (people in such relationships also have more sex.) To make this clear, in the diagram below, the left is my position, the right is your position.
My position does a better job of explaining the correlation between sex and happiness, while also explaining why people why promiscuous people are not enjoying the happiness of people in stable relationships.
You fail to consider the social, emotional, and psychological reasons why people are hesitant to engage in promiscuous sex. Desrtopa does an good job of explaining a part of this.
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.
False dichotomy—there might be arrows from “relationship” to “sex”, from “relationship” to “happiness” and from “sex” to “happiness”—and some of those might even be double-headed.
(If there was no arrow from “sex” to “happiness”, you could take 100 random couples, tell 50 of them at random to not have sex for six months, and those won’t be any less happy than the other 50. I’m not sure that’s what would happen.)
That diagram is to illustrate the difference between my explanation of the research showing a positive correlation between sex and happiness and Diego’s. I’m obviously not claiming these are the only possible relationships between sex and happiness. I’m not sure if you’re being deliberately obtuse or just not paying much attention.
This experiment is totally irrelevant to the disagreement between Diego and myself. Diego is claiming that making yourself have more sex—including sex you would otherwise be reluctant to have—will make you happier. He says he knows this because of some conjecture based on an ev-psych just-so story. Your experiment tests whether forcing people not to have sex they already do want to have will make them less happy. Do you not understand the difference?
If having epsilon much less sex would make us less happy, then having epsilon much more sex would make us happier, unless we are at exactly the local optimum, which sounds unlikely a priori.
Human preference doesn’t consider gains and losses symmetrically. We are dramatically more sensitive to losses than to gains.
By some popular metrics, sex acts are discrete (if not always discreet), not continuous: you can’t have epsilon more sex acts; you can have one more sex act.
It seems pretty plausible that we might be somewhere near the local optimum, or more precisely that most couples are somewhere near their optimum. (I see no reason to think that different couples’ optima are in the same place, or that everyone’s on the same side of their optimum.)
You’re now talking about epsilons, whereas your thought experiment involved getting couples to not have any sex at all for six months. That’s a pretty big epsilon. [EDITED to add, for clarity: If instead you asked these couples to skip sex on 10% of candidate occasions in the next six months, or to try to have 10% more than they’d otherwise have had, I don’t think it’s at all obvious what to expect in either case.]
So far as I can see, no one is claiming that there is no causal relationship between sex and happiness; only that the observed correlation between sex and happiness may be largely the result of a different combination of causal relationships. In particular, it seems somewhat plausible that the following might all be true. (a) Any given person, in any given relationship situation, has a rough optimum level of sexual activity. The same goes for any particular couple. (b) Deviating far from that level tends to make people less happy. (c) Being in a stable, well-functioning romantic relationship generally tends to make people happier, to increase their optimum amount of sex, and to make them have more sex. (d) People and couples tend to adjust to roughly their optimum amount of sex. If these are true, then there will be a correlation between sex and happiness because of (b), but for any given person or couple to increase the amount of sex they have might be counterproductive because of (d). And if these are true, then your thought experiment will have the outcome you predict. (Note: Everything about “couples” in this paragraph should be taken also to cover larger groups of people who have sex with one another.)
Asr is right, but it actually goes so much further than this.… You have also entirely failed to account for opportunity cost. You aren’t just adding some epsilon of sex, you’re subtracting from some other area of life to have more time for sex.
And these are just the abstract, theoretical problems with your suggestion. The real-world practical problems of adding more sex are enormous… There are serious bottlenecks to sex. Both partners have to be in the mood or the act has potentially serious negative utility. Synchronizing desire takes a lot of time and effort. (It takes much more than a minute of romance time to yield a minute of sex.)
But this post does say ‘use your System 2 even in a situation where most people rely on their System 1 alone and you’d be tempted to do the same’, so it wasn’t just an empty applause light in this case.
Huh. The advice in the post sounded fairly non-specific to me; most of the readers will probably find at least some of it that applies to them.
EDIT: the following is based on a misunderstanding of what knb meant, and maybe I should stop making several points in the same comment, even though it’d clutter Recent Comments, so that I can retract each of them individually.
Comparative advantage doesn’t apply to things you can’t trade; if I am good at (say) physics but mediocre at mating and you’re mediocre at physics but good at mating, there’s no way I can give you one unit of physics in exchange of one unit of mating. IOW, what ThrustVectoring said.
I obviously am not saying you can trade “mating.” However, you can get relationship advice from other sources. I’m surprised that you don’t understand the distinction.
Less Wrong folks tend to be good at writing and thinking about some things, like Newcomb’s problem, epistemic rationality, and decision theories, and not terribly good at giving advice in other areas. Less Wrong is, if anything, a bit on the left side of the bell curve of social intelligence. It doesn’t make sense for Less Wrong to try to specialize in relationship advice any more than it makes sense for us to start writing posts about auto repair or body building. There are other places for those topics. Less Wrong isn’t the only place to try to talk about these things, and we aren’t the best people to advise or seek advice from on many topics.
I had misunderstood you. Never mind.
He was involved with it the last time it reared its ugly head, so presumably he does.
I lol’d.
Original title was “Using Evolution for Marriage and Sex—Beyond PUA and Creepiness”