I think, WrongBot, that you may have bit off more than you can chew. I’m sure rationality can be deployed talking about sexual mores, but it is probably even harder to do than in politics.
In politics, people have to at least pretend to be vaguely rational or their opponents clobber them with good counter arguments, whereas with sexual stuff most people frequently lie, and are sometimes are even consciously rewarded for doing so.
If you insist on pushing forward, I’d recommend not posting anything until you have a reasonable idea of the order in which arguments and claims will be posted so that you never have to say that evidence for a conclusion in “this” post “will be covered in my next two posts”. Seriously… diagram the claims, the lemmas, and the evidence in a tree (or a web?). Then start at the bottom (with the evidence) converting article sized chunks of the diagram into essays with clean prose, helpful pictures, and a review for logic and typos before you post it.
Basically, start with the evidence and proceed to the bottom line.
It doesn’t matter whether Malthus had shaky assumptions in a paper two centuries ago. (And it seems weird to me that you would support this claim by linking to a comment of yours that stands at −5, though maybe the votes happened after the link?)
If you want to see how hunting and gathering human social systems operate, then try actually seeking out evidence about how hunting and gathering human social systems operate! Write some posts about actual humans living in ways that are hypothesized to be similar to humans in the ancestral environment so your audience is on the same page as you with the evidence about what kind of selection pressures our ancestors faced. Then back link within a reasonable amount of time (before the audience changes substantially or forgets) in support of reasonable conclusions based on this evidence. Maybe polyamory will come out in a good light based on this evidence? Who knows? Certainly not me… I haven’t looked up the evidence yet.
My vague guess would be that if we’re wired for anything then its to be to be culturally re-programmable on the subject, because different cultures seem to do gender stuff differently. Maybe arguing about this stuff is wired into us, in roughly the same way that we seem to be wired to form into factions and get all political at the drop of a hat. This might go some way to explaining why people seem to go crazy when they talk about reproduction...
If rationality means anything I would expect that it should be a bit more difficult to put together arguments rationally (as compared to untutored slapdash methods that most people bring to belief formation efforts). That extra effort should pay off in conclusions that are actually more accurate and useful. If they don’t, then the whole idea of a teachable “method of rationality” is a sham.
But assuming there is some point to rationality, this article doesn’t appear to be living up to those standards. This leads to my suggestion that you either give up, or else re-plan your “polyamory sequence”.
(If someone is wondering about my biases given the critical reception to the post, I’d just like to point out that I’m a conscious and ethical monogamist, and came to that position after reading The Ethical Slut. I don’t think poly people are morally bad at all, I’m friends with some people living that way quite happily, I just sometimes find myself feeling sorry for people who jump into it and end up as wrang wrangs. All the “owning your emotions” and “being ethical” stuff is also useful for simple pair bonding, without jumping into a social “N-body problem”. Basically, I’ve never thought I was smart enough to do that sort of thing “right”, and now the point is moot because I’m married and our relationship is explicitly and consciously closed.)
None of the groups cited in that article are nomadic foragers.
But assuming there is some point to rationality, this article doesn’t appear to be living up to those standards. This leads to my suggestion that you either give up, or else re-plan your “polyamory sequence”.
This sequence is not heading towards “We should all be polyamorous and be happy forever.” First, the multiple mating practiced by prehistoric foragers more closely resembles the behavior of bonobos than it does modern polyamory. Second, this isn’t my material. I am presenting content from Sex at Dawn, and foolishly thought this sequence should follow roughly the same order of presentation as the book; I will not make such a mistake again.
The other half of my response—broken in two so the discussion can branch naturally :-)
This sequence is not heading towards “We should all be polyamorous and be happy forever.”
Perhaps I misunderstood this bit:
I did eventually decide to pick up the book, primarily so that I could raid its bibliography for material for an upcoming post on jealousy management, and secondarily to test my vulnerability to confirmation bias. I succeeded in the first and failed in the second
I interpreted this to mean that you knew that your beliefs were nonstandard and your beliefs became more extreme after you were exposed to evidence. So I guessed that before reading you thought (guessing and summarizing here for concision, apologies if I miss the details) (1) that standard narratives about sexual relationships are confused enough to indicate that people could profitably reconsider their own sexual habits (as per your recent Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? post which I understood to be the first post in the sequence), and after reading the book, you thought (2) that this was still more true.
If these assumptions were correct, the implication would be (1) this is a case where most people really are wrong/crazy and exposure to evidence makes people justifiably extreme, or else (2) you were admitting to becoming more extreme in your beliefs because something lead you to discount evidence that disconfirmed your preferred theory while remembering and repeating confirming evidence. I thought the admission was very admirable, because that kind of self awareness is rare and seems usually to require effortful mindfulness. Even if you haven’t processed through to an update based on that kind of meta-recognition, noticing it would be pretty impressive.
The admission implied that you were aware that you were grinding an axe of some sort… If you think I misinterpret the nature of your planned advocacy, please let me know :-)
My post on unknown knowns isn’t really related to this sequence (and that’s why I identified this post as the sequence’s beginning), but that’s just a nitpick. I’m trying hard to avoid making any prescriptive conclusions in my discussion of Sex at Dawn, and instead to stick to unraveling the evidence about the conditions under which human beings evolved.
Before I read the book, I thought that “polyamory as popularly defined is basically a kick in the teeth to evolution.” Sex at Dawn makes a convincing case that the opposite is true, which may mean that polyamory is a better idea in the modern setting than I had thought. But I’m still very uncertain on that count, because the modern setting and the evolutionary setting are so different that what is adaptive in one is often totally crazy in the other.
If these assumptions were correct, the implication would be (1) this is a case where most people really are wrong/crazy and exposure to evidence makes people justifiably extreme, or else (2) you were admitting to becoming more extreme in your beliefs because something lead you to discount evidence that disconfirmed your preferred theory while remembering and repeating confirming evidence.
When I picked up the book, I was expecting that the case it made would be bad and that I might be tempted to agree with it anyway because I am generally a fan of polyamory. I can’t say definitively one way or the other whether I succumbed to that temptation: the book’s case seems like a very good one to me, which could either be true or the product of a motivated evaluation. I think that it’s the former, but that is itself evidence that supports both hypotheses.
The admission implied that you were aware that you were grinding an axe of some sort… If you think I misinterpret the nature of your planned advocacy, please let me know :-)
The axe I’m grinding is, I suppose, that I don’t think monogamy is built into the universal nature of human beings. This hardly seems like an axe to me, but a number of vehement objections seem to indicate otherwise.
OK, so now I’m thinking back to the first thing I said, which is that this subject is more difficult to talk about in public (without things going off the rails) than politics—so I think you should expect craziness on this subject.
I mean, laws about sex and relationships are frequently used for political purposes to increase the emotional drama of politics in order to get people worked up enough to vote...
I think my priors for this conversation were messed up but are improving, maybe? Each time I see more of your writing on this subject I’m surprised again, but a bit less so.
In the “poly kicks evolution in the teeth” link I was left scratching my head wondering why “Polyandry is no more egalitarian than polygyny; any relationship in which only one person is permitted to have other partners lies outside polyamory’s accepted definition”. I would have said that in a threesome, logically speaking, there are three dyadic partnerships and each person has two partners, but I think maybe you assumed (1) that no one is non-heterosexual, (2) only sexual partnerships count, and (3) all groups have at least one penis and at least one vagina (so you can’t just have three wives or three husbands in a closed but poly relationship).
I mean, if we’re ignoring all of our assumptions about human nature, why not treat orientation as “bisexual until tested” (reference for those who missed the joke) and therefore assume that unless otherwise specified the problem with a closed relationship with “2 of one gender and 1 of the other” is that the 1 doesn’t get enough variety in their life because they only get to have sex with the opposite gender… instead of always having that “little extra bit of variety in their married life” :-P
For a more “normal” scenario, the traditional explanation for polyandry in Tibet is that inheritance is patrilineal but “fair” (divided between all brothers) which would lead to farm holdings too small to support a family for any one brother (and starvation for all their families). The solution is to have the brothers share the farm, and also share the wife. Their primary loyalty is to each other, based on shared blood, and the single wife limits the number of possible children in a incredibly resource limited environment.
It originally seemed to me like you were coming from the poly community and reaching out to the rationality community (partly because I was hearing recapitulations of what I recognize as “defensive rationalizations of poly relationships” and assumed you’d originated them). Now I think (maybe?) it is the other way around: you’re starting with rationality and trying to bring us along as you explore poly issues?
All I’ve been trying to say is that all sorts of concrete, relevant, and surprising details come up in anthropology, and if you want to say something controversial about human nature, you should come at it with a measure of care, and start the public explanation with the data. I don’t think this is the standard approach taken with the poly community… at all.
So my tentative guess about our exchange here is that (1) “your axe” is simply thinking that it is worthwhile to be open minded about this controversial topic and (2) the defensive and biased elements of the arguments (to the degree that they exist and I’m noticing them) are mostly passed through from the source community that you’re drawing from as you read into the literature and summarize it for LW. I thought the admission of “an axe” was connected to “the defensive arguments” and was wrong about the connection.
Did I miss again, or do you think this is closer to the mark?
In the “poly kicks evolution in the teeth” link I was left scratching my head wondering why “Polyandry is no more egalitarian than polygyny; any relationship in which only one person is permitted to have other partners lies outside polyamory’s accepted definition”. I would have said that in a threesome, logically speaking, there are three dyadic partnerships and each person has two partners, but I think maybe you assumed (1) that no one is non-heterosexual, (2) only sexual partnerships count, and (3) all groups have at least one penis and at least one vagina (so you can’t just have three wives or three husbands in a closed but poly relationship).
A triad in which all three people are involved with each other, regardless of gender, absolutely counts as polyamory. As typically practiced, I believe, polygyny and polyandry don’t, because the man or the woman, respectively, is the only one allowed to have multiple partners. (For the record, I’m bisexual, so I was definitely not assuming (1).)
It originally seemed to me like you were coming from the poly community and reaching out to the rationality community (partly because I was hearing recapitulations of what I recognize as “defensive rationalizations of poly relationships” and assumed you’d originated them). Now I think (maybe?) it is the other way around: you’re starting with rationality and trying to bring us along as you explore poly issues?
I’ve been poly for ~4 years, which substantially predates my discovery of any sort of rationalist community, though I would have happily identified myself as a rationalist from about age six onward. Polyamory is unquestionably the right approach for me; while I doubt that that is universally true for all people, I believe it is worth careful consideration, and that many would find it advantageous to adopt.
So my tentative guess about our exchange here is that (1) “your axe” is simply thinking that it is worthwhile to be open minded about this controversial topic and (2) the defensive and biased elements of the arguments (to the degree that they exist and I’m noticing them) are mostly passed through from the source community that you’re drawing from as you read into the literature and summarize it for LW. I thought the admission of “an axe” was connected to “the defensive arguments” and was wrong about the connection.
So, yes, I’d agree with (1) here. As for (2), well, this post is the first in a sequence that is describing/summarizing arguments from a book, but the authors are not (to my knowledge) polyamorous, nor does the book make a strong conclusion in favor of polyamory.
If I have been biased or defensive on this topic elsewhere, that is my failing alone.
I thought about this for a while, and I think I just wanted to say that I appreciate your reasoned, revealing, and responsible tone. Also...
I’ve been poly for ~4 years, which substantially predates my discovery of any sort of rationalist community, though I would have happily identified myself as a rationalist from about age six onward. Polyamory is unquestionably the right approach for me; while I doubt that that is universally true for all people, I believe it is worth careful consideration, and that many would find it advantageous to adopt.
This would make a fantastic opener for a post. It offers a basis for your expertise on the subject and then a wonderfully clean thesis whose well-argued justification would probably be very educational. By setting the bar at “unquestionably for you” and “high value of information for nearly everyone” the justification would probably involve evidence and reasoning that was quite striking :-)
Why, thank you. I’m hoping that, between my Unknown Known post and this sequence, I’ll be able to do a pretty decent job of demonstrating the high value of information claim. As for why it’s so awesome for me, that really has more to do with quirks of my own psychology than anything else. Just off the top of my head:
It makes me miserable to have to think about relationships in terms of opportunity costs.
I prefer to do most of my socializing with well-known and well-trusted friends.
I attach relatively little emotional weight to sex.
I’m generally very good at managing my emotions, so I’m not much bothered by jealousy.
There are many traits I find attractive that couldn’t coexist in the same person. (Being bisexual is the extreme case.)
And, oh, probably lots more. But poly being a slam-dunk for me doesn’t say much about whether other people should adopt it (except for the tiny subset who share most of those traits), so I’ve been avoiding talking about my own experiences too much. Do you think that’s the wrong move?
I paused to think again :-) My instantaneous response idea was to generate a small laundry list of good and bad effects from talking about personal experiences, then pair it down to examples of categories, then use this to say “its really complicated, I don’t know”.
When an interaction is in full-on “adversarial debate mode” I think revealing personal stuff can be a bad thing to do if you accurately predict that the other person is just going to leap on your revelations as evidence for the bias they have been trying to accuse you of having in the course of an ad hominum and/or ad logicam. (And unfortunately, the difference between “that’s a bias and therefore I win” versus “that’s a bias and let’s try to overcome it” is small and depends critically on tone.)
In this case, for me, I think it was the right move because I ended up seeing it as a “lowering of defenses” (a sort of interpersonal CBM) after I’d implicitly requested that you do so. It would have been horrible of me to use something against you that you had revealed about yourself after I raised the possibility of defensiveness.
One way that polyamory might not be a kick in the teeth to evolution—if extended blood families are difficult to recruit for child-raising in the modern world (as seems to be the case), and it’s to the advantage of both parents and children to have additional help with child-raising, then the ability to recruit additional adults (whether in sexual relationships or not) should be selected for.
And, of course, you can kick evolution in the teeth any time you feel like it, and I think people spend a lot of time doing just that. [1] It’s just that you can’t get away with it indefinitely.
[1] It generally doesn’t seem to occur to people in dowry cultures to marry their daughters to people from non-dowry cultures, thus saving the money and still getting grandchildren.
I use this as evidence that memes can trump genes fairly easily.
I think it’s pretty obvious that monogamy isn’t built into human nature, but I object to the post pretty vehemently. Do you have any examples of vehement objections by people who insist that polyamory is ‘bad’ as opposed to by people who think that bad reasoning is ‘bad’?
I even said I planned to read the book some day, as it sounded interesting but badly reasoned. However, a short summary of an interesting but badly reasoned book, when the summary itself doesn’t comment on the bad reasoning but instead endorses said reasoning, on a rationality blog, seems to indicate to me that the author of the summary needs more practice before they can talk rationally about the subject.
Do you have any examples of vehement objections by people who insist that polyamory is ‘bad’ as opposed to by people who think that bad reasoning is ‘bad’?
Not specifically, no, nor did I expect to see objections on those grounds. LW generally frowns on unjustified moral absolutes, so far as I can tell. What I did expect to see (and do see) is motivated arguing that ignores my repeated protestations that this is the introductory first post in a sequence.
It is certainly true that I erred in mentioning the proposed hypothesis before showing the evidence that had gone into locating it. Yes, my bad. But the intended purpose of the post was not so obtuse that no one could comprehend it.
Why are you so convinced that Sex at Dawn (and my belief in its conclusion) is badly reasoned? You haven’t seen the reasoning yet! Would it be an unendurable annoyance if I were to ask you to hold off on forming a conclusion for another 12 hours, while I finish the second post? It won’t contain all the evidence I’m planning to present, but there’s a chance it’ll convince you that there was at least some amount of reasoning involved in this whole process.
Strong disagreements with Pinker are strong evidence for poor reasoning, but much weaker evidence for being wrong.
The blog post itself and its comments are pretty compelling evidence for poor rationality skills under stress, most notably the Malthus bit, as people other than myself have mentioned.
I endorse lots of books with fairly bad reasoning.
Breaking the responses in two so the discussion can branch naturally :-)
None of the groups cited in that article are nomadic foragers.
The link was intended as a convenient example of a place on the web to find an overview of real world anthropological data relating to sex relations, which could be summarized prior to summarizing conclusions that are probably inferentially far from the audience.
The particular details of people’s food acquisition habits weren’t the focus, merely the general fact of the technology scale and the availability of evidence on the subject. I don’t understand why you’d restrict yourself to “nomadic foragers” as opposed to the more general class of “hunter gatherer” who may or may not be nomadic. Is there a reason one is more important than the other?
Human “sedentarization” is hypothesized (see here for an example of observations contextulized in light of the hypothesis) to correlate with gender discrimination (more mobility goes with less discrimination—IE relatively less coercion of women by men) so I could see how there would be incentives to want to talk about mobile societies where historical arrangements were likely to be somewhat less horrible. An appeal to nature based on nomads is probably going to be a little more egalitarian and pleasant :-)
I don’t understand why you’d restrict yourself to “nomadic foragers” as opposed to the more general class of “hunter gatherer” who may or may not be nomadic. Is there a reason one is more important than the other?
Agriculture didn’t develop until ~8000 B.C. Prior to that point, there were no sedentary hunter-gatherers; mobility offered flexibility, and there was no reason at all to stay in one place.
So if we’re talking about human evolution, which took place almost entirely before that point, sedentary hunter-gatherers aren’t an accurate model of the conditions that shaped our development.
An appeal to nature based on nomads is probably going to be a little more egalitarian and pleasant :-)
I resent the implication that I am making an appeal to nature. However egalitarian and pleasant our nomadic ancestors’ lives may have been, I have no desire to imitate them. The best that evolutionary psychology can do is identify certain biological predilections; it cannot and should not attempt to justify them.
In additioned to teageegeepea’s points, the Mbuti (who were in the original link I provided that was criticized for having no “nomadic foragers”) have villages but no farming. Women help with the hunting and men help with the kids.
Despite being sedentary, anthropologists attribute their balanced sex roles to the fact that women traditionally build the huts, and have something kind of like property rights over them. They have a little bit of polygamy, but it is rare. (Also, they are sometimes treated horribly by political neighbors to the point of being hunted as food. It seems messed up to mention them as “examples for science” without also mentioning their actual interests as human beings.)
I resent the implication that I am making an appeal to nature. However egalitarian and pleasant our nomadic ancestors’ lives may have been, I have no desire to imitate them. The best that evolutionary psychology can do is identify certain biological predilections; it cannot and should not attempt to justify them.
“Appeal to nature” is a named fallacy because is super super common, and I didn’t even say you were committing it, I said “there would be incentives” to use certain evidence if anyone was going to. Even if you’re not committing the bias, lots of the people you’re reading probably do. When I notice “low hanging fallacy fruit” its seems useful to call it out so as to note the possible influence on everyone who reads it… it’s like verbally pointing out poison oak when you’re hiking, just to be safe.
Please slow down on the resentment! Seriously, you even quoted my smiley but got defensive anyway!
I’m not trying to insult you. I’m trying to figure out where you’re coming from and help you see where I’m coming from, so we can both get a better handle on the truth while trying to ensure that our writing has good epistemic effects on the audience at the same time :-)
In additioned to teageegeepea’s points, the Mbuti (who were in the original link I provided that was criticized for having no “nomadic foragers”) have villages but no farming. Women help with the hunting and men help with the kids.
They also engage in trade with nearby agricultural tribes for all kinds of stuff. And once you have stuff, you need a place to put it. And then you start to make a big deal about how it’s your stuff and not anyone else’s, and then you’re not living in the kind of egalitarian forager band that defined the evolutionary environment.
Please slow down on the resentment! Seriously, you even quoted my smiley but got defensive anyway!
I’m resentful of smilies :D (Disclaimer: this is a self-deprecating joke about my own grumpiness.)
According to Jane Jacobs, cities preceded agriculture. In “Before the Dawn” Wade seems to agree with that theory, as there is evidence that people lived in settled areas for a surprisingly long time without becoming agriculturalists. I was surprised how late agriculture emerged in Japan.
A notable example of a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers that American readers may have heard about it middle school are the native americans of the northwest, who relied on the large amounts of available salmon nearby and had “potlatches” featuring the conspicuous destruction of expensive goods.
Jane Jacobs is an urban planner and an economist. While that does not mean that she is wrong, I am not terribly inclined to believe her theory in the absence of any sort of evidence; so far as I can tell, the only justification she offers is a thought experiment. Absent something convincing one way or the other, I’m inclined to consider which came first an open question.
Wikipedia cites Japan as having some form of primitive agriculture contemporaneously with the earliest settlements, but its reliability is, as ever, uncertain.
I’m not sure how fishing fits into all of this; it may be an important exception to the general trend.
In any case, unless settlements preceded agriculture by more than a couple millenia (which Jacobs doesn’t seem to claim), anatomically modern humans were still nomads for 95% of their history and nomadic foragers are still our best model of the evolutionary environment.
Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist who did a lot to oppose urban renewal. I suppose you could argue that there were some sorts of urban planning she liked (mixed use, pedestrian-friendly) but on the whole, she supported bottom-up social networks.
My “Jane Jacobs” link was to Overcoming Bias, where it was suggested (by someone other than Jacobs) that sedentary communities preceded agriculture by up to 3000 years, which I suppose would fit your “couple millenia).
Your Jomon link said that their pottery is evidence of sedentary living and described its origin as Mesolithic, or “Middle Stone Age” and preceding the Neolithic of agriculture. It also said they were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. It describes them as having “some of the highest densities known for foraging populations”, though noting that Pacific Americans were similarly high.
When humans left Africa they seem to have hugged the southeast coastline. We can expect that they had boats since they were able to reach Australia and the polynesian islands. So I think fishing was pretty important. Cavalli-Sforza writes of pre-Jomon Japan “A major source of food in those pre-agricultural times came from fishing, then as now, and this would have limited for ecological reasons the area of expansion to the coastline”.
I think, WrongBot, that you may have bit off more than you can chew. I’m sure rationality can be deployed talking about sexual mores, but it is probably even harder to do than in politics.
In politics, people have to at least pretend to be vaguely rational or their opponents clobber them with good counter arguments, whereas with sexual stuff most people frequently lie, and are sometimes are even consciously rewarded for doing so.
If you insist on pushing forward, I’d recommend not posting anything until you have a reasonable idea of the order in which arguments and claims will be posted so that you never have to say that evidence for a conclusion in “this” post “will be covered in my next two posts”. Seriously… diagram the claims, the lemmas, and the evidence in a tree (or a web?). Then start at the bottom (with the evidence) converting article sized chunks of the diagram into essays with clean prose, helpful pictures, and a review for logic and typos before you post it.
Basically, start with the evidence and proceed to the bottom line.
It doesn’t matter whether Malthus had shaky assumptions in a paper two centuries ago. (And it seems weird to me that you would support this claim by linking to a comment of yours that stands at −5, though maybe the votes happened after the link?)
If you want to see how hunting and gathering human social systems operate, then try actually seeking out evidence about how hunting and gathering human social systems operate! Write some posts about actual humans living in ways that are hypothesized to be similar to humans in the ancestral environment so your audience is on the same page as you with the evidence about what kind of selection pressures our ancestors faced. Then back link within a reasonable amount of time (before the audience changes substantially or forgets) in support of reasonable conclusions based on this evidence. Maybe polyamory will come out in a good light based on this evidence? Who knows? Certainly not me… I haven’t looked up the evidence yet.
My vague guess would be that if we’re wired for anything then its to be to be culturally re-programmable on the subject, because different cultures seem to do gender stuff differently. Maybe arguing about this stuff is wired into us, in roughly the same way that we seem to be wired to form into factions and get all political at the drop of a hat. This might go some way to explaining why people seem to go crazy when they talk about reproduction...
If rationality means anything I would expect that it should be a bit more difficult to put together arguments rationally (as compared to untutored slapdash methods that most people bring to belief formation efforts). That extra effort should pay off in conclusions that are actually more accurate and useful. If they don’t, then the whole idea of a teachable “method of rationality” is a sham.
But assuming there is some point to rationality, this article doesn’t appear to be living up to those standards. This leads to my suggestion that you either give up, or else re-plan your “polyamory sequence”.
(If someone is wondering about my biases given the critical reception to the post, I’d just like to point out that I’m a conscious and ethical monogamist, and came to that position after reading The Ethical Slut. I don’t think poly people are morally bad at all, I’m friends with some people living that way quite happily, I just sometimes find myself feeling sorry for people who jump into it and end up as wrang wrangs. All the “owning your emotions” and “being ethical” stuff is also useful for simple pair bonding, without jumping into a social “N-body problem”. Basically, I’ve never thought I was smart enough to do that sort of thing “right”, and now the point is moot because I’m married and our relationship is explicitly and consciously closed.)
None of the groups cited in that article are nomadic foragers.
This sequence is not heading towards “We should all be polyamorous and be happy forever.” First, the multiple mating practiced by prehistoric foragers more closely resembles the behavior of bonobos than it does modern polyamory. Second, this isn’t my material. I am presenting content from Sex at Dawn, and foolishly thought this sequence should follow roughly the same order of presentation as the book; I will not make such a mistake again.
The other half of my response—broken in two so the discussion can branch naturally :-)
Perhaps I misunderstood this bit:
I interpreted this to mean that you knew that your beliefs were nonstandard and your beliefs became more extreme after you were exposed to evidence. So I guessed that before reading you thought (guessing and summarizing here for concision, apologies if I miss the details) (1) that standard narratives about sexual relationships are confused enough to indicate that people could profitably reconsider their own sexual habits (as per your recent Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? post which I understood to be the first post in the sequence), and after reading the book, you thought (2) that this was still more true.
If these assumptions were correct, the implication would be (1) this is a case where most people really are wrong/crazy and exposure to evidence makes people justifiably extreme, or else (2) you were admitting to becoming more extreme in your beliefs because something lead you to discount evidence that disconfirmed your preferred theory while remembering and repeating confirming evidence. I thought the admission was very admirable, because that kind of self awareness is rare and seems usually to require effortful mindfulness. Even if you haven’t processed through to an update based on that kind of meta-recognition, noticing it would be pretty impressive.
The admission implied that you were aware that you were grinding an axe of some sort… If you think I misinterpret the nature of your planned advocacy, please let me know :-)
My post on unknown knowns isn’t really related to this sequence (and that’s why I identified this post as the sequence’s beginning), but that’s just a nitpick. I’m trying hard to avoid making any prescriptive conclusions in my discussion of Sex at Dawn, and instead to stick to unraveling the evidence about the conditions under which human beings evolved.
Before I read the book, I thought that “polyamory as popularly defined is basically a kick in the teeth to evolution.” Sex at Dawn makes a convincing case that the opposite is true, which may mean that polyamory is a better idea in the modern setting than I had thought. But I’m still very uncertain on that count, because the modern setting and the evolutionary setting are so different that what is adaptive in one is often totally crazy in the other.
When I picked up the book, I was expecting that the case it made would be bad and that I might be tempted to agree with it anyway because I am generally a fan of polyamory. I can’t say definitively one way or the other whether I succumbed to that temptation: the book’s case seems like a very good one to me, which could either be true or the product of a motivated evaluation. I think that it’s the former, but that is itself evidence that supports both hypotheses.
The axe I’m grinding is, I suppose, that I don’t think monogamy is built into the universal nature of human beings. This hardly seems like an axe to me, but a number of vehement objections seem to indicate otherwise.
OK, so now I’m thinking back to the first thing I said, which is that this subject is more difficult to talk about in public (without things going off the rails) than politics—so I think you should expect craziness on this subject.
I mean, laws about sex and relationships are frequently used for political purposes to increase the emotional drama of politics in order to get people worked up enough to vote...
I think my priors for this conversation were messed up but are improving, maybe? Each time I see more of your writing on this subject I’m surprised again, but a bit less so.
In the “poly kicks evolution in the teeth” link I was left scratching my head wondering why “Polyandry is no more egalitarian than polygyny; any relationship in which only one person is permitted to have other partners lies outside polyamory’s accepted definition”. I would have said that in a threesome, logically speaking, there are three dyadic partnerships and each person has two partners, but I think maybe you assumed (1) that no one is non-heterosexual, (2) only sexual partnerships count, and (3) all groups have at least one penis and at least one vagina (so you can’t just have three wives or three husbands in a closed but poly relationship).
I mean, if we’re ignoring all of our assumptions about human nature, why not treat orientation as “bisexual until tested” (reference for those who missed the joke) and therefore assume that unless otherwise specified the problem with a closed relationship with “2 of one gender and 1 of the other” is that the 1 doesn’t get enough variety in their life because they only get to have sex with the opposite gender… instead of always having that “little extra bit of variety in their married life” :-P
For a more “normal” scenario, the traditional explanation for polyandry in Tibet is that inheritance is patrilineal but “fair” (divided between all brothers) which would lead to farm holdings too small to support a family for any one brother (and starvation for all their families). The solution is to have the brothers share the farm, and also share the wife. Their primary loyalty is to each other, based on shared blood, and the single wife limits the number of possible children in a incredibly resource limited environment.
It originally seemed to me like you were coming from the poly community and reaching out to the rationality community (partly because I was hearing recapitulations of what I recognize as “defensive rationalizations of poly relationships” and assumed you’d originated them). Now I think (maybe?) it is the other way around: you’re starting with rationality and trying to bring us along as you explore poly issues?
All I’ve been trying to say is that all sorts of concrete, relevant, and surprising details come up in anthropology, and if you want to say something controversial about human nature, you should come at it with a measure of care, and start the public explanation with the data. I don’t think this is the standard approach taken with the poly community… at all.
So my tentative guess about our exchange here is that (1) “your axe” is simply thinking that it is worthwhile to be open minded about this controversial topic and (2) the defensive and biased elements of the arguments (to the degree that they exist and I’m noticing them) are mostly passed through from the source community that you’re drawing from as you read into the literature and summarize it for LW. I thought the admission of “an axe” was connected to “the defensive arguments” and was wrong about the connection.
Did I miss again, or do you think this is closer to the mark?
A triad in which all three people are involved with each other, regardless of gender, absolutely counts as polyamory. As typically practiced, I believe, polygyny and polyandry don’t, because the man or the woman, respectively, is the only one allowed to have multiple partners. (For the record, I’m bisexual, so I was definitely not assuming (1).)
I’ve been poly for ~4 years, which substantially predates my discovery of any sort of rationalist community, though I would have happily identified myself as a rationalist from about age six onward. Polyamory is unquestionably the right approach for me; while I doubt that that is universally true for all people, I believe it is worth careful consideration, and that many would find it advantageous to adopt.
So, yes, I’d agree with (1) here. As for (2), well, this post is the first in a sequence that is describing/summarizing arguments from a book, but the authors are not (to my knowledge) polyamorous, nor does the book make a strong conclusion in favor of polyamory.
If I have been biased or defensive on this topic elsewhere, that is my failing alone.
I thought about this for a while, and I think I just wanted to say that I appreciate your reasoned, revealing, and responsible tone. Also...
This would make a fantastic opener for a post. It offers a basis for your expertise on the subject and then a wonderfully clean thesis whose well-argued justification would probably be very educational. By setting the bar at “unquestionably for you” and “high value of information for nearly everyone” the justification would probably involve evidence and reasoning that was quite striking :-)
Why, thank you. I’m hoping that, between my Unknown Known post and this sequence, I’ll be able to do a pretty decent job of demonstrating the high value of information claim. As for why it’s so awesome for me, that really has more to do with quirks of my own psychology than anything else. Just off the top of my head:
It makes me miserable to have to think about relationships in terms of opportunity costs.
I prefer to do most of my socializing with well-known and well-trusted friends.
I attach relatively little emotional weight to sex.
I’m generally very good at managing my emotions, so I’m not much bothered by jealousy.
There are many traits I find attractive that couldn’t coexist in the same person. (Being bisexual is the extreme case.)
And, oh, probably lots more. But poly being a slam-dunk for me doesn’t say much about whether other people should adopt it (except for the tiny subset who share most of those traits), so I’ve been avoiding talking about my own experiences too much. Do you think that’s the wrong move?
I paused to think again :-) My instantaneous response idea was to generate a small laundry list of good and bad effects from talking about personal experiences, then pair it down to examples of categories, then use this to say “its really complicated, I don’t know”.
When an interaction is in full-on “adversarial debate mode” I think revealing personal stuff can be a bad thing to do if you accurately predict that the other person is just going to leap on your revelations as evidence for the bias they have been trying to accuse you of having in the course of an ad hominum and/or ad logicam. (And unfortunately, the difference between “that’s a bias and therefore I win” versus “that’s a bias and let’s try to overcome it” is small and depends critically on tone.)
In this case, for me, I think it was the right move because I ended up seeing it as a “lowering of defenses” (a sort of interpersonal CBM) after I’d implicitly requested that you do so. It would have been horrible of me to use something against you that you had revealed about yourself after I raised the possibility of defensiveness.
So um… I think, maybe, yay for us? :-P
::internet high five::
One way that polyamory might not be a kick in the teeth to evolution—if extended blood families are difficult to recruit for child-raising in the modern world (as seems to be the case), and it’s to the advantage of both parents and children to have additional help with child-raising, then the ability to recruit additional adults (whether in sexual relationships or not) should be selected for.
And, of course, you can kick evolution in the teeth any time you feel like it, and I think people spend a lot of time doing just that. [1] It’s just that you can’t get away with it indefinitely.
[1] It generally doesn’t seem to occur to people in dowry cultures to marry their daughters to people from non-dowry cultures, thus saving the money and still getting grandchildren.
I use this as evidence that memes can trump genes fairly easily.
I think it’s pretty obvious that monogamy isn’t built into human nature, but I object to the post pretty vehemently. Do you have any examples of vehement objections by people who insist that polyamory is ‘bad’ as opposed to by people who think that bad reasoning is ‘bad’?
I even said I planned to read the book some day, as it sounded interesting but badly reasoned. However, a short summary of an interesting but badly reasoned book, when the summary itself doesn’t comment on the bad reasoning but instead endorses said reasoning, on a rationality blog, seems to indicate to me that the author of the summary needs more practice before they can talk rationally about the subject.
Not specifically, no, nor did I expect to see objections on those grounds. LW generally frowns on unjustified moral absolutes, so far as I can tell. What I did expect to see (and do see) is motivated arguing that ignores my repeated protestations that this is the introductory first post in a sequence.
It is certainly true that I erred in mentioning the proposed hypothesis before showing the evidence that had gone into locating it. Yes, my bad. But the intended purpose of the post was not so obtuse that no one could comprehend it.
Why are you so convinced that Sex at Dawn (and my belief in its conclusion) is badly reasoned? You haven’t seen the reasoning yet! Would it be an unendurable annoyance if I were to ask you to hold off on forming a conclusion for another 12 hours, while I finish the second post? It won’t contain all the evidence I’m planning to present, but there’s a chance it’ll convince you that there was at least some amount of reasoning involved in this whole process.
What claims are do you think are being made and how do you identify them as motivated arguments?
So you haven’t read the book, but you know it’s badly reasoned, and anyone who endorses it must not be good at rationality?
Strong disagreements with Pinker are strong evidence for poor reasoning, but much weaker evidence for being wrong.
The blog post itself and its comments are pretty compelling evidence for poor rationality skills under stress, most notably the Malthus bit, as people other than myself have mentioned.
I endorse lots of books with fairly bad reasoning.
I’m also surprised and confused by Michael Vassar’s reaction to this post.
Breaking the responses in two so the discussion can branch naturally :-)
The link was intended as a convenient example of a place on the web to find an overview of real world anthropological data relating to sex relations, which could be summarized prior to summarizing conclusions that are probably inferentially far from the audience.
The particular details of people’s food acquisition habits weren’t the focus, merely the general fact of the technology scale and the availability of evidence on the subject. I don’t understand why you’d restrict yourself to “nomadic foragers” as opposed to the more general class of “hunter gatherer” who may or may not be nomadic. Is there a reason one is more important than the other?
Human “sedentarization” is hypothesized (see here for an example of observations contextulized in light of the hypothesis) to correlate with gender discrimination (more mobility goes with less discrimination—IE relatively less coercion of women by men) so I could see how there would be incentives to want to talk about mobile societies where historical arrangements were likely to be somewhat less horrible. An appeal to nature based on nomads is probably going to be a little more egalitarian and pleasant :-)
Agriculture didn’t develop until ~8000 B.C. Prior to that point, there were no sedentary hunter-gatherers; mobility offered flexibility, and there was no reason at all to stay in one place.
So if we’re talking about human evolution, which took place almost entirely before that point, sedentary hunter-gatherers aren’t an accurate model of the conditions that shaped our development.
I resent the implication that I am making an appeal to nature. However egalitarian and pleasant our nomadic ancestors’ lives may have been, I have no desire to imitate them. The best that evolutionary psychology can do is identify certain biological predilections; it cannot and should not attempt to justify them.
In additioned to teageegeepea’s points, the Mbuti (who were in the original link I provided that was criticized for having no “nomadic foragers”) have villages but no farming. Women help with the hunting and men help with the kids.
Despite being sedentary, anthropologists attribute their balanced sex roles to the fact that women traditionally build the huts, and have something kind of like property rights over them. They have a little bit of polygamy, but it is rare. (Also, they are sometimes treated horribly by political neighbors to the point of being hunted as food. It seems messed up to mention them as “examples for science” without also mentioning their actual interests as human beings.)
“Appeal to nature” is a named fallacy because is super super common, and I didn’t even say you were committing it, I said “there would be incentives” to use certain evidence if anyone was going to. Even if you’re not committing the bias, lots of the people you’re reading probably do. When I notice “low hanging fallacy fruit” its seems useful to call it out so as to note the possible influence on everyone who reads it… it’s like verbally pointing out poison oak when you’re hiking, just to be safe.
Please slow down on the resentment! Seriously, you even quoted my smiley but got defensive anyway!
I’m not trying to insult you. I’m trying to figure out where you’re coming from and help you see where I’m coming from, so we can both get a better handle on the truth while trying to ensure that our writing has good epistemic effects on the audience at the same time :-)
They also engage in trade with nearby agricultural tribes for all kinds of stuff. And once you have stuff, you need a place to put it. And then you start to make a big deal about how it’s your stuff and not anyone else’s, and then you’re not living in the kind of egalitarian forager band that defined the evolutionary environment.
I’m resentful of smilies :D (Disclaimer: this is a self-deprecating joke about my own grumpiness.)
According to Jane Jacobs, cities preceded agriculture. In “Before the Dawn” Wade seems to agree with that theory, as there is evidence that people lived in settled areas for a surprisingly long time without becoming agriculturalists. I was surprised how late agriculture emerged in Japan.
A notable example of a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers that American readers may have heard about it middle school are the native americans of the northwest, who relied on the large amounts of available salmon nearby and had “potlatches” featuring the conspicuous destruction of expensive goods.
Jane Jacobs is an urban planner and an economist. While that does not mean that she is wrong, I am not terribly inclined to believe her theory in the absence of any sort of evidence; so far as I can tell, the only justification she offers is a thought experiment. Absent something convincing one way or the other, I’m inclined to consider which came first an open question.
Wikipedia cites Japan as having some form of primitive agriculture contemporaneously with the earliest settlements, but its reliability is, as ever, uncertain.
I’m not sure how fishing fits into all of this; it may be an important exception to the general trend.
In any case, unless settlements preceded agriculture by more than a couple millenia (which Jacobs doesn’t seem to claim), anatomically modern humans were still nomads for 95% of their history and nomadic foragers are still our best model of the evolutionary environment.
Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist who did a lot to oppose urban renewal. I suppose you could argue that there were some sorts of urban planning she liked (mixed use, pedestrian-friendly) but on the whole, she supported bottom-up social networks.
My “Jane Jacobs” link was to Overcoming Bias, where it was suggested (by someone other than Jacobs) that sedentary communities preceded agriculture by up to 3000 years, which I suppose would fit your “couple millenia).
Your Jomon link said that their pottery is evidence of sedentary living and described its origin as Mesolithic, or “Middle Stone Age” and preceding the Neolithic of agriculture. It also said they were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. It describes them as having “some of the highest densities known for foraging populations”, though noting that Pacific Americans were similarly high.
When humans left Africa they seem to have hugged the southeast coastline. We can expect that they had boats since they were able to reach Australia and the polynesian islands. So I think fishing was pretty important. Cavalli-Sforza writes of pre-Jomon Japan “A major source of food in those pre-agricultural times came from fishing, then as now, and this would have limited for ecological reasons the area of expansion to the coastline”.