The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments, especially when you consider sexual jealousy. If everyone were straight, I could trust my wife with half the population, and she could trust me with half the population- if everyone were bisexual, I would now have to consider the possibility that my wife/husband were cheating on me with literally everyone s/he knows, and s/he would have the same worry.
Similarly, the number of unrequited connections could increase significantly. I’m not sure what would happen with sexual frustration- there would be more desire but also probably more fulfillment.
Then you get to other measures, like STD transmission or population growth. If you give all men the desire to have sex with other men, given the increased willingness of men to have casual sex compared to women it seems like you’ll get fewer stable couples, fewer child-raising couples, and more promiscuity, leading to dramatic increases in STDs.
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people > without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments,
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
especially when you consider sexual jealousy.
Options: Non-monogamy. Trusting your partner. Communication with partner, ascertaining whether emotional needs are likely to be met in this relationship. Accepting that sexual jealousy happens because humans are emotional animals and that its mere existence does not constitute a failure mode.
If everyone were straight, I could trust my wife with half the population, and she could trust me with > half the population-
Or you could actually trust each other. What kind of trust is it that depends upon the other player being unable to defect? And are you so entirely sure your wife couldn’t be bisexual?
Similarly, the number of unrequited connections could increase significantly.
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It’s not like unrequited attraction is new.
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
I have no doubt that I unconsciously evaluate every person I interact with; where else would the label “cute” come from?
Options: Non-monogamy.
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant. That is, many people would choose many varieties of non-monogamy, and the existence of jealousy would complicate those choices.
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It’s not like unrequited attraction is new.
Sure. But remember that policy debates should not appear one-sided. Having to deal with unrequited attractions is a cost, even if people get good at doing so. The question about net loss or net gain is about balancing losses and gains. There are a number of benefits to everyone becoming bisexual, but also a number of costs, and when I eyeball them I reckon the costs as larger than the benefits.
Do you evaluate kittens, small children, and the like as potential partners as well, then? “Cute” can come from a lot of places, not all of them shorthand for “attractive in a mateseeking way.”
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant.
My point in that actual section was that the problems you’re talking about seemed less like costs one could universally infer as arising from the button-press, and more like you projecting your own relationship difficulties onto other people. I wasn’t advocating monogamy as an additional button-press to fix the problem you see, I was pointing out that the problem you’re talking about already has solutions that don’t disappear if we press this button, and that the problem as you stated it seems to have more bearing on you specifically than on humanity in general.
“Cute” can come from a lot of places, not all of them shorthand for “attractive in a mateseeking way.”
You’re right, “sexy” would have been a better word to use there.
My point in that actual section was that the problems you’re talking about seemed less like costs one could universally infer as arising from the button-press, and more like you projecting your own relationship difficulties onto other people.
I see how it could seem that way, but that is not the case from my perspective. My relationship difficulties stem mostly from the small size of the gay dating pool and the attractiveness of my straight male friends. If everyone were bisexual, my dating pool would be massively larger and my male friends might be interested in me, and thus I would probably be better off.
But when I look at straight people around me, and ask myself what their difficulties are, and ask if bisexuality is likely to make them worse off or better off, it seems to me unlikely that the gains would outweigh the losses. The solutions you suggest- I would prefer the term “strategies”- are sometimes employed successfully, and sometimes not, and it’s not clear to me if bisexuality being the norm makes them more likely to be employed successfully.
I see how it could seem that way, but that is not the case from my perspective. My relationship difficulties stem mostly from the small size of the gay dating pool and the attractiveness of my straight male friends
Small size of the dating pool where you are specifically, or your perceptions of its small size generally? It’s an important distinction...
(I ask because in theory my own dating pool is quite small: I’m transgendered, polyamorous, bi, autistic, disabled—my dating pool might seem very small when performing a naive analysis just because anyone willing/able to deal with dating someone who’s one of those things is still not necessarily willing/able to deal with all the others, and intuitively the more you stack on such multipliers the harder it is to find people who fulfill those conditions...yet I’m in something like five concurrent relationships right now, and go on dates with new people several times a year at minimum. I’m not enjoying straight-up statistical cluster benefits from being bi and poly; being any of the other things has been a serious handicap in those circles in my experience...so a cursory look at the estimated size of my dating pool is very misleading, because clearly I can and do have lots of relationships...being poly just makes it possible to do so concurrently.)
As for the attractiveness of your straight male friends, how does that actually cause relationship difficulties? Presumably you’re not getting into romantic relationships with them?
The solutions you suggest- I would prefer the term “strategies”- are sometimes employed successfully, and sometimes not
I guess I just don’t see how an uptick in unrequited attractions is a fundamental issue. If most people couldn’t find a suitable partner, then it would be more obviously an issue, but...hell, I get unrequited feelings for people all the time, it sucks and it hurts, sometimes a lot, but does it really impair people in a long-term sense? In a way that existing coping mechanisms couldn’t account for?
As for the attractiveness of your straight male friends, how does that actually cause relationship difficulties? Presumably you’re not getting into romantic relationships with them?
It is unpleasant to have desires no amount of planning or effort could deliver, and not be able to convince the source of that desire of that desire’s futility without risking something. It is a sad thing to lose a friend by asking them out, and a sadder thing to be in turmoil over when and how.
does it really impair people in a long-term sense?
Does it need to be long-term for it to be a cost?
Were I to explain my intuition about the long-term and broad consequences, I would talk about things like reduced population growth, increased STD prevalence, and possibly decreased social harmony. Talking about something like social harmony is easier to do if you start off with the short-term and small-scale, though.
(I ask because in theory my own dating pool is quite small: I’m transgendered, polyamorous, bi, autistic, disabled—my dating pool might seem very small when performing a naive analysis just because anyone willing/able to deal with dating someone who’s one of those things is still not necessarily willing/able to deal with all the others, and intuitively the more you stack on such multipliers the harder it is to find people who fulfill those conditions...yet I’m in something like five concurrent relationships right now, and go on dates with new people several times a year at minimum. I’m not enjoying straight-up statistical cluster benefits from being bi and poly; being any of the other things has been a serious handicap in those circles in my experience...so a cursory look at the estimated size of my dating pool is very misleading, because clearly I can and do have lots of relationships...being poly just makes it possible to do so concurrently.)
A small pool in statistical terms can still be shockingly large in absolute terms, given the number of humans currently alive. People who tolerate, or outright prefer, those qualities in a prospective mate will have an equally limited pool of prospective mates, and react with a corresponding degree of enthusiasm.
A small pool in statistical terms can still be shockingly large in absolute terms, given the number of humans currently alive.
That would be my point in its entirety, yes.
People who tolerate, or outright prefer, those qualities in a prospective mate will have an equally limited pool of prospective mates
Does not follow at all. People who like, or seek some subset of those qualities might still be considered very desirable in the eyes of a large number of others.
(Hell, I can think of several past and present partners of mine who were positively spoiled for choice, and mostly dated folks who weren’t those things, and still found me interesting as a mate...)
and react with a corresponding degree of enthusiasm.
Yeah, no. I think you have a straw model of attraction here.
I think as a good Bayesian you actually DO have to view every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance, and every potential partner around your Significant other as, to some degree, a competitor.
I often wonder if first order rationality is actually beneficial in this matter. I may instinctively trust my partner, but at what rate do trusting people get cheated on relative to non-trusting people? That’s all the strength of evidence that my trust can offer me.
All of these seem more like problems with monogamy than problems with bisexuality.
Edit: Also,
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments
All of these seem more like problems with monogamy than problems with bisexuality.
Polygamous people don’t have to worry about STDs or population collapse?
Relevant...?
As in, asexuals wouldn’t want to become sexuals? Oftentimes, they don’t. Being interested in a single gender is essentially ‘asexuality lite’ in that you both have the prospect of fulfilling sexual relationships and there are groups in which you can just set sex aside and focus on other things. The convenient thing about being straight is that the sex-free group is people similar to you- one of the awkward things about being gay is that the sex-free group is people dissimilar to you. (The group is also very tiny, ignoring asexuals: once you add a second lesbian, now there’s a chance the two of them will be attracted to each other.)
Polygamous people don’t have to worry about STDs or population collapse?
You might have a point about STDs, but I doubt it’s your true rejection—if that were all, it would just mean spending more effort toward education, prevention and cures. Mostly I was talking about the assumptions underlying your concern with jealousy / trust / cheating, unrequited connections, stable couples / childraising couples, and promiscuity.
And could you explain what you mean by ‘population collapse’? I’m confused.
As in, asexuals wouldn’t want to become sexuals?
Yes, but the point was more like: it goes both ways. If you have it, the advantages seem to outweigh the flaws; if you don’t, it seems the other way around.
And could you explain what you mean by ‘population collapse’? I’m confused.
As more men date men and more women date women, the amount of accidental childbearing decreases, and thus the total amount of childbearing. Beyond that, having a stable population is more than just 2.1 children per women- it’s generally expected to be painful to have the elderly as a larger fraction of the population.
I doubt it’s your true rejection—if that were all, it would just mean spending more effort toward education, prevention and cures.
Which is all I need to show something in the loss column, neh?
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.” Obviously, modern society is not the EEA, but it’s a better place to start from than idealism.
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.”
Gaining with respect to our utility functions is not what evolution selects for. If evolution has a choice in the short term between more miserable people who have more successful offspring and happier people with fewer successful offspring then evolution will have more miserable people. Don’t confuse what the blind idiot god does with what we want or would consider to be at all good.
Don’t confuse what the blind idiot god does with what we want or would consider to be at all good.
I’m not. Societies don’t have utility functions; they propagate forward in time through a blind process similar enough to evolution. As mentioned in an ancestral comment, I suspect I personally would be better off in a society where everyone were bisexual, but suspect that the overall society would be worse off.
As more men date men and more women date women, the amount of accidental childbearing decreases, and thus the total amount of childbearing.
Intuitively, I would have thought of this as a good thing, but
Beyond that, having a stable population is more than just 2.1 children per women- it’s generally expected to be painful to have the elderly as a larger fraction of the population.
is a good point.
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.”
??? Let me get this straight: in this context, your definition of ‘better’ is ‘increases reproductive fitness’?
Let me get this straight: in this context, your definition of ‘better’ is ‘increases reproductive fitness’?
My original claim was “net social loss.” Such a term is purposefully vague, but I suspect it should be uncontroversial that something that leads to collapse or replacement counts as a net social loss.
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is a benefit to being able to befriend / work with people without having to deal with the possibility of romantic attachments, especially when you consider sexual jealousy. If everyone were straight, I could trust my wife with half the population, and she could trust me with half the population- if everyone were bisexual, I would now have to consider the possibility that my wife/husband were cheating on me with literally everyone s/he knows, and s/he would have the same worry.
Similarly, the number of unrequited connections could increase significantly. I’m not sure what would happen with sexual frustration- there would be more desire but also probably more fulfillment.
Then you get to other measures, like STD transmission or population growth. If you give all men the desire to have sex with other men, given the increased willingness of men to have casual sex compared to women it seems like you’ll get fewer stable couples, fewer child-raising couples, and more promiscuity, leading to dramatic increases in STDs.
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
Options: Non-monogamy. Trusting your partner. Communication with partner, ascertaining whether emotional needs are likely to be met in this relationship. Accepting that sexual jealousy happens because humans are emotional animals and that its mere existence does not constitute a failure mode.
Or you could actually trust each other. What kind of trust is it that depends upon the other player being unable to defect? And are you so entirely sure your wife couldn’t be bisexual?
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It’s not like unrequited attraction is new.
I have no doubt that I unconsciously evaluate every person I interact with; where else would the label “cute” come from?
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant. That is, many people would choose many varieties of non-monogamy, and the existence of jealousy would complicate those choices.
Sure. But remember that policy debates should not appear one-sided. Having to deal with unrequited attractions is a cost, even if people get good at doing so. The question about net loss or net gain is about balancing losses and gains. There are a number of benefits to everyone becoming bisexual, but also a number of costs, and when I eyeball them I reckon the costs as larger than the benefits.
Do you evaluate kittens, small children, and the like as potential partners as well, then? “Cute” can come from a lot of places, not all of them shorthand for “attractive in a mateseeking way.”
My point in that actual section was that the problems you’re talking about seemed less like costs one could universally infer as arising from the button-press, and more like you projecting your own relationship difficulties onto other people. I wasn’t advocating monogamy as an additional button-press to fix the problem you see, I was pointing out that the problem you’re talking about already has solutions that don’t disappear if we press this button, and that the problem as you stated it seems to have more bearing on you specifically than on humanity in general.
You’re right, “sexy” would have been a better word to use there.
I see how it could seem that way, but that is not the case from my perspective. My relationship difficulties stem mostly from the small size of the gay dating pool and the attractiveness of my straight male friends. If everyone were bisexual, my dating pool would be massively larger and my male friends might be interested in me, and thus I would probably be better off.
But when I look at straight people around me, and ask myself what their difficulties are, and ask if bisexuality is likely to make them worse off or better off, it seems to me unlikely that the gains would outweigh the losses. The solutions you suggest- I would prefer the term “strategies”- are sometimes employed successfully, and sometimes not, and it’s not clear to me if bisexuality being the norm makes them more likely to be employed successfully.
Small size of the dating pool where you are specifically, or your perceptions of its small size generally? It’s an important distinction...
(I ask because in theory my own dating pool is quite small: I’m transgendered, polyamorous, bi, autistic, disabled—my dating pool might seem very small when performing a naive analysis just because anyone willing/able to deal with dating someone who’s one of those things is still not necessarily willing/able to deal with all the others, and intuitively the more you stack on such multipliers the harder it is to find people who fulfill those conditions...yet I’m in something like five concurrent relationships right now, and go on dates with new people several times a year at minimum. I’m not enjoying straight-up statistical cluster benefits from being bi and poly; being any of the other things has been a serious handicap in those circles in my experience...so a cursory look at the estimated size of my dating pool is very misleading, because clearly I can and do have lots of relationships...being poly just makes it possible to do so concurrently.)
As for the attractiveness of your straight male friends, how does that actually cause relationship difficulties? Presumably you’re not getting into romantic relationships with them?
I guess I just don’t see how an uptick in unrequited attractions is a fundamental issue. If most people couldn’t find a suitable partner, then it would be more obviously an issue, but...hell, I get unrequited feelings for people all the time, it sucks and it hurts, sometimes a lot, but does it really impair people in a long-term sense? In a way that existing coping mechanisms couldn’t account for?
It is unpleasant to have desires no amount of planning or effort could deliver, and not be able to convince the source of that desire of that desire’s futility without risking something. It is a sad thing to lose a friend by asking them out, and a sadder thing to be in turmoil over when and how.
Does it need to be long-term for it to be a cost?
Were I to explain my intuition about the long-term and broad consequences, I would talk about things like reduced population growth, increased STD prevalence, and possibly decreased social harmony. Talking about something like social harmony is easier to do if you start off with the short-term and small-scale, though.
A small pool in statistical terms can still be shockingly large in absolute terms, given the number of humans currently alive. People who tolerate, or outright prefer, those qualities in a prospective mate will have an equally limited pool of prospective mates, and react with a corresponding degree of enthusiasm.
That would be my point in its entirety, yes.
Does not follow at all. People who like, or seek some subset of those qualities might still be considered very desirable in the eyes of a large number of others.
(Hell, I can think of several past and present partners of mine who were positively spoiled for choice, and mostly dated folks who weren’t those things, and still found me interesting as a mate...)
Yeah, no. I think you have a straw model of attraction here.
I think as a good Bayesian you actually DO have to view every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance, and every potential partner around your Significant other as, to some degree, a competitor. I often wonder if first order rationality is actually beneficial in this matter. I may instinctively trust my partner, but at what rate do trusting people get cheated on relative to non-trusting people? That’s all the strength of evidence that my trust can offer me.
All of these seem more like problems with monogamy than problems with bisexuality.
Edit: Also,
Relevant...?
Polygamous people don’t have to worry about STDs or population collapse?
As in, asexuals wouldn’t want to become sexuals? Oftentimes, they don’t. Being interested in a single gender is essentially ‘asexuality lite’ in that you both have the prospect of fulfilling sexual relationships and there are groups in which you can just set sex aside and focus on other things. The convenient thing about being straight is that the sex-free group is people similar to you- one of the awkward things about being gay is that the sex-free group is people dissimilar to you. (The group is also very tiny, ignoring asexuals: once you add a second lesbian, now there’s a chance the two of them will be attracted to each other.)
You might have a point about STDs, but I doubt it’s your true rejection—if that were all, it would just mean spending more effort toward education, prevention and cures. Mostly I was talking about the assumptions underlying your concern with jealousy / trust / cheating, unrequited connections, stable couples / childraising couples, and promiscuity.
And could you explain what you mean by ‘population collapse’? I’m confused.
Yes, but the point was more like: it goes both ways. If you have it, the advantages seem to outweigh the flaws; if you don’t, it seems the other way around.
As more men date men and more women date women, the amount of accidental childbearing decreases, and thus the total amount of childbearing. Beyond that, having a stable population is more than just 2.1 children per women- it’s generally expected to be painful to have the elderly as a larger fraction of the population.
Which is all I need to show something in the loss column, neh?
My true rejection is along the lines of “if it were better for everyone to be bisexual, everyone would be already be bisexual, thanks to evolution.” Obviously, modern society is not the EEA, but it’s a better place to start from than idealism.
Gaining with respect to our utility functions is not what evolution selects for. If evolution has a choice in the short term between more miserable people who have more successful offspring and happier people with fewer successful offspring then evolution will have more miserable people. Don’t confuse what the blind idiot god does with what we want or would consider to be at all good.
I’m not. Societies don’t have utility functions; they propagate forward in time through a blind process similar enough to evolution. As mentioned in an ancestral comment, I suspect I personally would be better off in a society where everyone were bisexual, but suspect that the overall society would be worse off.
Intuitively, I would have thought of this as a good thing, but
is a good point.
??? Let me get this straight: in this context, your definition of ‘better’ is ‘increases reproductive fitness’?
My original claim was “net social loss.” Such a term is purposefully vague, but I suspect it should be uncontroversial that something that leads to collapse or replacement counts as a net social loss.