Why are so many rationalists polyamorous? I don’t see why this idea is linked to the LW ideology, unlike transhumanism, atheism, effective altruism, etc. which all seem to follow logically.
Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances. In the general population many naturally poly people are ‘conformed’ into being mono the same way they might be conformed into being religious. Thus ‘people who want to be poly can be’ would reasonably be expected to correlate with elements of the Correct Contrarian Cluster, and you would expect to find more polyamorous atheists or (he predicted more boldly) polyamorous endorsers of no-collapse quantum mechanics than in the general population, even outside LW. There are also specifically cognitive-rationality skills like ‘resist Asch’s conformity’ and ‘be Munchkin’, and community effects like ‘Be around people who will listen with interest to long chains of reasoning instead of immediately shunning you.’
It’s likely that Eliezer isn’t tending towards either side of the nature vs. nurture debate, and as such isn’t claiming that nature or nurture is doing the work in generating preferences.
I would expect the answer to be “Yes, but with open discussion rather than social pressure, when one partner would prefer a monogamous relationship with someone who self-identifies as poly.” See http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/
I would say that’s a typical case of an antiprediction. Humans differ in all sorts of things (IQ, height, sexual orientation), so why shouldn’t they differ in relationship-preferences?
I have seen several cases of relationships in which the other person seems to be strongly mono by nature, and the other strongly poly by nature. They generally don’t go very well, though they sometimes do: this seems to require the mono partner being of the type who can be okay with their partner dating others. Otherwise one of them is going to end up deeply unhappy, even if the relationship lasts.
And someone people aren’t either one. Polyamory isn’t the only kind of non-monogamy, and of course there are those who don’t do sexual and/or romantic relationships at all.
Personal observation. Since the topic is deeply important to the mental health and happiness of a large fraction of the entire human population but sounds slightly silly, I would not particularly expect any significant experiments to have been done by academic science. Surveys of percentage actually practicing polyamory, yes, attempts to directly determine a wish / tendency / suitability in a general population, no.
This is falsifiable if Carl or Jonah want to check cynicism, though I wouldn’t be too surprised (the Kinsey Institute exists).
When you’re going off of personal observation, how do you distinguish whether preference for number of partners is a (relatively) hard-coded variable in the brain like sexuality, or if it’s something highly malleable like e.g. preference to live in a rural or suburban area? Obviously empirically there are people who prefer to be polyamorous, people who prefer to be monogamous, and people who could go either way, but it doesn’t necessarily seem obvious to me that there are a whole bunch of people who inherently long to be polyamorous that are being stifled by our monogamous society. (Not sure if that’s what you’re claiming.)
it doesn’t necessarily seem obvious to me that there are a whole bunch of people who inherently long to be polyamorous that are being stifled by our monogamous society.
I have seen people end up in monogamous relationships, later on realize that loving one person doesn’t prevent them from falling in love with other people as well, and then be unable to even really talk about the issue with their partner, since Western culture tends to interpret falling in love with somebody else as an automatic sign of the relationship having fundamentally failed.
.. I would also expect this to be a low-research area, but not due to sounding silly, but rather due to high-noise datasets. People lie about their sexual desires a lot. This particular desire is even more likely to be denied or concealed from researchers than most, so I would expect most people setting out to look into this to get to the “Design data-collection protocol” stage, acquire a monumental headache, and then go research which kind of diet is easiest to stick with instead.
More seriously: I think it follows perfectly well from rationality which is at it’s core about doing non obvious things that result in better outcomes once you do the math. Obviously it comes down to preferences but many people seem to prefer multiple partners and only refrain because society condemns it. Polyamkry is more honest than cheating and more preference satisfying than monogamy for those with poly amorous inclinations.
More specific benefits: you can get sex more often with less scheduling disruptions
You can have mutually fulfilling partial relationships that would not be sustainable if they had to be monogamous. Eg: someone can get most of their affection from you but indulge their foot fetish with someone else. Or if you simply have a different sex drive than your partner.
More widespread emotional support network. If you’re prone to loneliness, having more people you can connect with will help you not lean all your metaphorical weight on one person
Less inhibition: depending on the rules of your polyamory you no longer have to kill your own urges when seeing someone attractive to you. This may be a downside if you want to get work done.
If one or more of you is bi you get to talk about people you find hot and seducing them to your bed. This is lots of fun.
Less stress: the converse of 3, you don’t have to b the entire emotional support for another person.
I think this is mostly a community thing: it just so happened that some key figures in the two largest rationalist communities (SF and NY) were polyamorous, so it became popular relative to the general population, and probably also popular relative to the coasts’ populations.
I think that the effect is stronger than just that. Of the poly people associated with LW that I know, at least a quarter knew they were poly before they got into LW. Sure, it’s a small sample size, but I would be surprised if polyamorous people were less likely to be interested in rationality.
My guess is that it’s a combination of it existing among original LWers in the first place and LW culture being much more favorable to it than main stream.
Not being poly and only a bit rational (so far), I’ll only propose
Is polyamory actually higher amongst LW people than the general population? Do you just have more exposure to polyamorous LW people than a wider polyamorous population?
Do polyamorous LW people talk about their polyamory more than polyamorous non-LW people?
Is polyamory actually higher amongst LW people than the general population?
This made me realize I didn’t even know whether there were reliable estimates of polyamory prevalence in the general population. A cursory Google Scholar search didn’t net me anything, but the Wikipedia article has a data point:
Research into polyamory has been limited. A comprehensive government study of sexual attitudes, behaviors and relationships in Finland in 1992 (age 18-75, around 50% both genders) found that around 200 out of 2250 (8.9%) respondents “agreed or strongly agreed” with the statement “I could maintain several sexual relationships at the same time” and 8.2% indicated a relationship type “that best suits” at the present stage of life would involve multiple partners.
Meanwhile, 13% of LWers in the 2012 survey said they preferred polyamorous relationships, although only 6% reported having multiple current partners. While 13% is appreciably higher than the Finnish survey’s 8%-9%, the discrepancy could just be because the Finnish survey’s from a different time & place and has a more even gender ratio.
Danke. I’m a bit relieved to see you didn’t find much either in terms of representative samples of the general population; I can feel a bit better about being lazy. (I did get a kick out of the popularity of open marriages among the kind of people who answer surveys on Oprah’s website.)
In addition to some of the things other people have suggested, it is my possibly incorrect observation that there is at least a weak inverse correlation between desire for personal immortality and desire to have children. If one has already ruled out having children, a lot of the complications that arise from polyamory disappear.
Which complications? I thought poly and kids mix just fine. Ideally, you get help with raising the kids, the kids get more positive adult influences in their life.
I look forward to confronting that question, actually. I’m reluctant to assume my genes are the ones that deserve greater representation in humanity’s future. No matter who I end up with, if we exercise our wonderful poly selflessness and work together to decide who can provide the best legacy, we can at least say that the results will be better than if we’d each just individually had the standard 2.2 kids as per the status quo.
Perhaps rationalist in a modern society, values things like careers and quality of life more importantly than sharing resources and a stable relationship to raise a family and feel monogamy is not as optimal. Besides, isn’t a large part of the culture of monogamy rooted in religion? Most religious people are monogamous because that is what their religion tells them to do.
I think you’re extrapolating from too little data. It would be nice to see some stats on this (not sure how you would go about collecting such stats...)
Why are so many rationalists polyamorous? I don’t see why this idea is linked to the LW ideology, unlike transhumanism, atheism, effective altruism, etc. which all seem to follow logically.
Question presupposes that it is linked to the LW ideology (wow, let’s not use that phrase ever again), which isn’t clear to me.
I don’t think they are, except in a waffly ‘compared to the general population’ sense; look at the surveys.
Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances. In the general population many naturally poly people are ‘conformed’ into being mono the same way they might be conformed into being religious. Thus ‘people who want to be poly can be’ would reasonably be expected to correlate with elements of the Correct Contrarian Cluster, and you would expect to find more polyamorous atheists or (he predicted more boldly) polyamorous endorsers of no-collapse quantum mechanics than in the general population, even outside LW. There are also specifically cognitive-rationality skills like ‘resist Asch’s conformity’ and ‘be Munchkin’, and community effects like ‘Be around people who will listen with interest to long chains of reasoning instead of immediately shunning you.’
When you say ‘naturally’, are you referring to genetics, prenatal environment, or something else?
How should I know?
You could’ve read some papers on the topic for example. (I’m answering this because it is after all in the stupid questions thread)
Fair enough.
I apologize if I misinterpreted your statement:
I was curious what was meant by this.
It’s likely that Eliezer isn’t tending towards either side of the nature vs. nurture debate, and as such isn’t claiming that nature or nurture is doing the work in generating preferences.
One wonders if in the populations of rationalists (CFAR in particular) that there are naturally mono people who are ‘conformed’ into being poly?
I would expect the answer to be “Yes, but with open discussion rather than social pressure, when one partner would prefer a monogamous relationship with someone who self-identifies as poly.” See http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/
What’s the source of this claim? I hadn’t heard that until today.
I would say that’s a typical case of an antiprediction. Humans differ in all sorts of things (IQ, height, sexual orientation), so why shouldn’t they differ in relationship-preferences?
seems to mean something other than
I took the ‘naturally’ to just mean that there was some sort of subconscious inclination.
I have seen several cases of relationships in which the other person seems to be strongly mono by nature, and the other strongly poly by nature. They generally don’t go very well, though they sometimes do: this seems to require the mono partner being of the type who can be okay with their partner dating others. Otherwise one of them is going to end up deeply unhappy, even if the relationship lasts.
And someone people aren’t either one. Polyamory isn’t the only kind of non-monogamy, and of course there are those who don’t do sexual and/or romantic relationships at all.
Personal observation. Since the topic is deeply important to the mental health and happiness of a large fraction of the entire human population but sounds slightly silly, I would not particularly expect any significant experiments to have been done by academic science. Surveys of percentage actually practicing polyamory, yes, attempts to directly determine a wish / tendency / suitability in a general population, no.
This is falsifiable if Carl or Jonah want to check cynicism, though I wouldn’t be too surprised (the Kinsey Institute exists).
When you’re going off of personal observation, how do you distinguish whether preference for number of partners is a (relatively) hard-coded variable in the brain like sexuality, or if it’s something highly malleable like e.g. preference to live in a rural or suburban area? Obviously empirically there are people who prefer to be polyamorous, people who prefer to be monogamous, and people who could go either way, but it doesn’t necessarily seem obvious to me that there are a whole bunch of people who inherently long to be polyamorous that are being stifled by our monogamous society. (Not sure if that’s what you’re claiming.)
I have seen people end up in monogamous relationships, later on realize that loving one person doesn’t prevent them from falling in love with other people as well, and then be unable to even really talk about the issue with their partner, since Western culture tends to interpret falling in love with somebody else as an automatic sign of the relationship having fundamentally failed.
.. I would also expect this to be a low-research area, but not due to sounding silly, but rather due to high-noise datasets. People lie about their sexual desires a lot. This particular desire is even more likely to be denied or concealed from researchers than most, so I would expect most people setting out to look into this to get to the “Design data-collection protocol” stage, acquire a monumental headache, and then go research which kind of diet is easiest to stick with instead.
I think it’s the influence of San Francisco
More seriously: I think it follows perfectly well from rationality which is at it’s core about doing non obvious things that result in better outcomes once you do the math. Obviously it comes down to preferences but many people seem to prefer multiple partners and only refrain because society condemns it. Polyamkry is more honest than cheating and more preference satisfying than monogamy for those with poly amorous inclinations.
Plus there’s all the conveniences.
Historical note: Started in OBNYC and spread to the Bay.
Nitpicky tangent:
Don’t neglect the obvious things that result in better outcomes.
You’re either already doing those or they’re not actually obvious.
Objection! They might be obvious, and you’re failing to do them out of akrasia or similar.
Not that that’s ever happened to me.
More specific benefits: you can get sex more often with less scheduling disruptions
You can have mutually fulfilling partial relationships that would not be sustainable if they had to be monogamous. Eg: someone can get most of their affection from you but indulge their foot fetish with someone else. Or if you simply have a different sex drive than your partner.
More widespread emotional support network. If you’re prone to loneliness, having more people you can connect with will help you not lean all your metaphorical weight on one person
Less inhibition: depending on the rules of your polyamory you no longer have to kill your own urges when seeing someone attractive to you. This may be a downside if you want to get work done.
If one or more of you is bi you get to talk about people you find hot and seducing them to your bed. This is lots of fun.
Less stress: the converse of 3, you don’t have to b the entire emotional support for another person.
If a polyamorous group is sharing a household, there are more skills and there’s more likely to be someone who doesn’t hate a particular chore.
And the somewhat different claim: sharing a household with people is good for that and other reasons and polyamory can make that go more smoothly
I think this is mostly a community thing: it just so happened that some key figures in the two largest rationalist communities (SF and NY) were polyamorous, so it became popular relative to the general population, and probably also popular relative to the coasts’ populations.
I think that the effect is stronger than just that. Of the poly people associated with LW that I know, at least a quarter knew they were poly before they got into LW. Sure, it’s a small sample size, but I would be surprised if polyamorous people were less likely to be interested in rationality.
Datapoint: I was poly before joining LW.
This might be an interesting question to ask Yvain to put on the next mega survey.
I was also.
My guess is that it’s a combination of it existing among original LWers in the first place and LW culture being much more favorable to it than main stream.
Not being poly and only a bit rational (so far), I’ll only propose
Is polyamory actually higher amongst LW people than the general population? Do you just have more exposure to polyamorous LW people than a wider polyamorous population?
Do polyamorous LW people talk about their polyamory more than polyamorous non-LW people?
This made me realize I didn’t even know whether there were reliable estimates of polyamory prevalence in the general population. A cursory Google Scholar search didn’t net me anything, but the Wikipedia article has a data point:
Meanwhile, 13% of LWers in the 2012 survey said they preferred polyamorous relationships, although only 6% reported having multiple current partners. While 13% is appreciably higher than the Finnish survey’s 8%-9%, the discrepancy could just be because the Finnish survey’s from a different time & place and has a more even gender ratio.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p9/open_thread_february_114_2012/5v6g may help.
Danke. I’m a bit relieved to see you didn’t find much either in terms of representative samples of the general population; I can feel a bit better about being lazy. (I did get a kick out of the popularity of open marriages among the kind of people who answer surveys on Oprah’s website.)
Survey says that 13% are poly and 30% are uncertain or lack a preference. That’s higher than the general public.
it might not be much higher once you control for age, gender, location, socioeconomic status, etc.
In particular, I have no idea what fraction of the non-LW-reading but otherwise similar public would say “uncertain/no preference.”
i suspect that religious prohibitions significantly reduce the amount of westerners who are poly, so it kinda follows from the atheism part.
I don’t actually agree with that too much. It’s more a rationalism thing than an atheism or irreligious thing.
In addition to some of the things other people have suggested, it is my possibly incorrect observation that there is at least a weak inverse correlation between desire for personal immortality and desire to have children. If one has already ruled out having children, a lot of the complications that arise from polyamory disappear.
Which complications? I thought poly and kids mix just fine. Ideally, you get help with raising the kids, the kids get more positive adult influences in their life.
Whose genes and womb do you use? Who decides which schools, where the kid lives, and so on? Not to mention only two people will be legal parents.
I look forward to confronting that question, actually. I’m reluctant to assume my genes are the ones that deserve greater representation in humanity’s future. No matter who I end up with, if we exercise our wonderful poly selflessness and work together to decide who can provide the best legacy, we can at least say that the results will be better than if we’d each just individually had the standard 2.2 kids as per the status quo.
Perhaps rationalist in a modern society, values things like careers and quality of life more importantly than sharing resources and a stable relationship to raise a family and feel monogamy is not as optimal. Besides, isn’t a large part of the culture of monogamy rooted in religion? Most religious people are monogamous because that is what their religion tells them to do.
Adding to the laundry list of explanations and trivializations, gender skew!
Oh, wow, I liked this. Devastatingly cynical.
My guess: founder effects and the sheer dumb luck of what people got sucked into it and what attitudes they brought with them.
I think you’re extrapolating from too little data. It would be nice to see some stats on this (not sure how you would go about collecting such stats...)
This may be of interest.