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.
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.