Well, now this is going to make my post on hacking myself poly, which I was going to publish after confirming success with a month or two of field-testing, look redundant.
Also, I register disapproval for trying to split the audience of the post this way.
I would love to see a post on hacking yourself poly from a woman’s perspective. To be honest, I’m a little frustrated with the extent to which all dating advice on LessWrong is aimed at those attracted to females. (Luke’s post is great and well considered, though).
Well, you’d know better than me if your post would be redundant. (And I wasn’t trying to make assumptions, sorry). But if you can write it in a way that doesn’t assume your audience is universally attracted to women, that’s what I’d appreciate.
I’m not criticizing Luke’s post, to make that clear; the rationality takeaways are very well universalized and the topic material is highly personal so he couldn’t really have written it differently.
I have no need to hack myself poly, but I’m curious about what separates this kind of preference hacking from the kinds we tend to treat as taboo here.
You obviously wouldn’t want to hack yourself to change your terminal preferences (Gandhi and the murder pill), but hacking yourself to change your behavior to help you maximize terminal preferences is fine.(Gandhi taking a pill that would allow him to go without sleep indefinitely, freeing up 6+ hours a day for peaceful protesting). Hacking other people is usually bad. I can’t think of an example of self-hacking to change behaviors being treated as taboo, but I’d be interested if you can think of one.
Hacking oneself to be polyamorous seems itself like preference rather than behavior hacking, which is why I’m confused. I would have to change what I want out of relationships to become uncomfortable with being in romantic relationships containing more than two people (my case is a bit more complicated than that, there are different types of polyamory, but the specifics aren’t relevant to the main point.) Similarly, I find it doubtful that a person hard wired for monogamy (and some people seem to be intensely monogamous by nature,) could be hacked into polyamory without altering their values with regards to relationships.
The only real problem I have with Luke’s post is that thus far, this type of post has been very male-centric, and I think a pair of articles would have helped alleviate that. (It might even make sense to deliberately collaborate, and it could be interesting to initially hide your identities and keep gender references neutral [I currently don’t know whether you prefer women exclusively] and see if people can tell the difference).
(Breaking the rules on version reading, but I read the other one first, and this one has more relevant discussion.)
The OP almost made me cry because of my current romantic situation. This comment didn’t help (I mean that in a good way). I realized during my first (and so far, only major) romantic relationship in college that while there was enormous value for me in having such a relationship, I couldn’t stand the exclusivity. I said so and it didn’t go over particularly well, but I continued trying to compromise. Our relationship was on-and-off in college. Now we’ve graduated and live in different cities but for over six months until recently had a happy open relationship (or sexual friendship, or whatever you want to call it), in which we visit when we can and talk by phone the rest of the time (we’re both busy grad students comfortable with low communication frequency and high average conversation quality). As of the beginning of the summer I was trying to start a romance with someone at my current university. We hit it off right away after meeting each other, and there was no question about chemistry. Things seemed to be going well, though they were complicated by the fact that she was away for most of the summer. I made my views on polyamory clear from the beginning, and she didn’t like them at first, but seemed to be warming up to the idea.
As of this week my first lover took up a religion out of nowhere and want to excise sex from our relationship (hardly mindful of the massive collateral damage that will cause, even without the other problems with religion). (I will probably want to write about this separately, but I need to pull myself together first.) And my second lover has pronounced having second thoughts about the idea of polyamory and will not touch me. The timing is coincidental (I’m pretty sure), but it hurts just the same.
After years of reflection, I think that I’m about as natively poly as it’s possible to be. I have focused my efforts on serious long-term relationships, since those seem by far the most valuable to me, but I wonder if this is causing me to miss my connection with other people who are more sympathetic to polyamory. I have not found a lot of sympathy for my viewpoint over the years, not that people have ever been keen to offer actual arguments to support the monogamous status quo. The most substantive points I’ve ever heard raised are STIs (which are a distraction, they apply equally to serial monogamy and there are well-known steps that can be taken to avert the risk) and jealousy. I don’t seem to be capable of feeling much jealousy, and have at times tried incredibly hard to get my lovers to pursue other interests so they would appreciate polyamory better. As far as I can tell, people who do experience a lot of jealousy have just as much to gain from being more open and honest about their reasons for exclusivity (instead of treating it as a conerstone of morality itself), but I know how arrogant it would be to pretend I understand their perspective. Ironically, jealousy doesn’t seem to be the problem in my current situation. Despite knowing that it makes things more difficult, I have gradually developed the resolve to insist on polyamory, refusing to enter an exclusive relationship on principle. I have hoped to achieve major long-term gains this way.
So in the last few days I have been depressed and irrationally thinking things like “girls will never be able to handle polyamory” (not that I’ve encountered many other guys who like the idea, and there’s plenty of directly contradictory evidence on the internet) and “I have to do it the way other people want if I’m to get any love at all” (yet best-selling books have been written by people who do it the way I’m trying to go for, trying to encourage others to do the same). Then I saw this post, the first time I recall polyamory coming up on LessWrong in a major way (I’ve been lurking since the beginning). LessWrong somehow feels a lot closer to me than other random places on the internet. It breaks my heart, somehow in a good way, to see a group of people notice the insanity of mononormativity and start a discussion about how to “hack themselves poly”, a noble and courageous task I couldn’t even begin to understand since I started out this way (and I don’t really know what it’s like to stare down the barrel of one’s own jealousy).
I would encourage you to publish it anyway, even if it looks redundant to you—additional datapoints are always welcome; and more specifically I just am interested in your perspective to the subject.
Yes. I don’t think the differences in the posts are significant enough to be worth the inconvenience to the audience, and it splits the discussion, too.
Caused a flare of uncomfortable curiosity between the moment when I realized I’d been instructed not to look at something and the moment when I realized I didn’t care.
More specifically, I meant “were you actually genuinely upset, or were you mildly upset in a way that you decided to milk for comedic value.” Both seemed plausible. (And I wasn’t attaching judgement to either of them)
But I consider the questioned answered. Apologies for the loading.
Well, now this is going to make my post on hacking myself poly, which I was going to publish after confirming success with a month or two of field-testing, look redundant.
Also, I register disapproval for trying to split the audience of the post this way.
I would love to see a post on hacking yourself poly from a woman’s perspective. To be honest, I’m a little frustrated with the extent to which all dating advice on LessWrong is aimed at those attracted to females. (Luke’s post is great and well considered, though).
I’m actually staggered by the amount of so-called “dating advice” on LW in the first place.
Hey, I’m attracted to females. Females are pretty. But yes, I am also one.
Well, you’d know better than me if your post would be redundant. (And I wasn’t trying to make assumptions, sorry). But if you can write it in a way that doesn’t assume your audience is universally attracted to women, that’s what I’d appreciate.
I’m not criticizing Luke’s post, to make that clear; the rationality takeaways are very well universalized and the topic material is highly personal so he couldn’t really have written it differently.
I have no need to hack myself poly, but I’m curious about what separates this kind of preference hacking from the kinds we tend to treat as taboo here.
You obviously wouldn’t want to hack yourself to change your terminal preferences (Gandhi and the murder pill), but hacking yourself to change your behavior to help you maximize terminal preferences is fine.(Gandhi taking a pill that would allow him to go without sleep indefinitely, freeing up 6+ hours a day for peaceful protesting). Hacking other people is usually bad.
I can’t think of an example of self-hacking to change behaviors being treated as taboo, but I’d be interested if you can think of one.
Hacking oneself to be polyamorous seems itself like preference rather than behavior hacking, which is why I’m confused. I would have to change what I want out of relationships to become uncomfortable with being in romantic relationships containing more than two people (my case is a bit more complicated than that, there are different types of polyamory, but the specifics aren’t relevant to the main point.) Similarly, I find it doubtful that a person hard wired for monogamy (and some people seem to be intensely monogamous by nature,) could be hacked into polyamory without altering their values with regards to relationships.
The only real problem I have with Luke’s post is that thus far, this type of post has been very male-centric, and I think a pair of articles would have helped alleviate that. (It might even make sense to deliberately collaborate, and it could be interesting to initially hide your identities and keep gender references neutral [I currently don’t know whether you prefer women exclusively] and see if people can tell the difference).
(Breaking the rules on version reading, but I read the other one first, and this one has more relevant discussion.)
The OP almost made me cry because of my current romantic situation. This comment didn’t help (I mean that in a good way). I realized during my first (and so far, only major) romantic relationship in college that while there was enormous value for me in having such a relationship, I couldn’t stand the exclusivity. I said so and it didn’t go over particularly well, but I continued trying to compromise. Our relationship was on-and-off in college. Now we’ve graduated and live in different cities but for over six months until recently had a happy open relationship (or sexual friendship, or whatever you want to call it), in which we visit when we can and talk by phone the rest of the time (we’re both busy grad students comfortable with low communication frequency and high average conversation quality). As of the beginning of the summer I was trying to start a romance with someone at my current university. We hit it off right away after meeting each other, and there was no question about chemistry. Things seemed to be going well, though they were complicated by the fact that she was away for most of the summer. I made my views on polyamory clear from the beginning, and she didn’t like them at first, but seemed to be warming up to the idea.
As of this week my first lover took up a religion out of nowhere and want to excise sex from our relationship (hardly mindful of the massive collateral damage that will cause, even without the other problems with religion). (I will probably want to write about this separately, but I need to pull myself together first.) And my second lover has pronounced having second thoughts about the idea of polyamory and will not touch me. The timing is coincidental (I’m pretty sure), but it hurts just the same.
After years of reflection, I think that I’m about as natively poly as it’s possible to be. I have focused my efforts on serious long-term relationships, since those seem by far the most valuable to me, but I wonder if this is causing me to miss my connection with other people who are more sympathetic to polyamory. I have not found a lot of sympathy for my viewpoint over the years, not that people have ever been keen to offer actual arguments to support the monogamous status quo. The most substantive points I’ve ever heard raised are STIs (which are a distraction, they apply equally to serial monogamy and there are well-known steps that can be taken to avert the risk) and jealousy. I don’t seem to be capable of feeling much jealousy, and have at times tried incredibly hard to get my lovers to pursue other interests so they would appreciate polyamory better. As far as I can tell, people who do experience a lot of jealousy have just as much to gain from being more open and honest about their reasons for exclusivity (instead of treating it as a conerstone of morality itself), but I know how arrogant it would be to pretend I understand their perspective. Ironically, jealousy doesn’t seem to be the problem in my current situation. Despite knowing that it makes things more difficult, I have gradually developed the resolve to insist on polyamory, refusing to enter an exclusive relationship on principle. I have hoped to achieve major long-term gains this way.
So in the last few days I have been depressed and irrationally thinking things like “girls will never be able to handle polyamory” (not that I’ve encountered many other guys who like the idea, and there’s plenty of directly contradictory evidence on the internet) and “I have to do it the way other people want if I’m to get any love at all” (yet best-selling books have been written by people who do it the way I’m trying to go for, trying to encourage others to do the same). Then I saw this post, the first time I recall polyamory coming up on LessWrong in a major way (I’ve been lurking since the beginning). LessWrong somehow feels a lot closer to me than other random places on the internet. It breaks my heart, somehow in a good way, to see a group of people notice the insanity of mononormativity and start a discussion about how to “hack themselves poly”, a noble and courageous task I couldn’t even begin to understand since I started out this way (and I don’t really know what it’s like to stare down the barrel of one’s own jealousy).
So...carry on.
I would encourage you to publish it anyway, even if it looks redundant to you—additional datapoints are always welcome; and more specifically I just am interested in your perspective to the subject.
Is your disapproval a reflective equilibrium? Does it remain after thinking about the advantages of A/B testing approaches to a controversial topic?
Yes. I don’t think the differences in the posts are significant enough to be worth the inconvenience to the audience, and it splits the discussion, too.
After reading the other version, I agree that the differences seem trivial. It’s interesting that the scores are an order of magnitude apart, though.
Can you elaborate on why you dislike splitting the audience (which I assume is for testing)?
Caused a flare of uncomfortable curiosity between the moment when I realized I’d been instructed not to look at something and the moment when I realized I didn’t care.
In the grand scheme of things, do you actually consider that a big deal?
I’ll pretend you asked that question without loading it with the phrase “in the grand scheme of things”.
Yes. I do think it is a big deal. Curiosity is pain.
More specifically, I meant “were you actually genuinely upset, or were you mildly upset in a way that you decided to milk for comedic value.” Both seemed plausible. (And I wasn’t attaching judgement to either of them)
But I consider the questioned answered. Apologies for the loading.