Yeah I definitely wouldn’t want to say that this framing is the whole answer—just that I found it seemed interesting / suggestive / productive of interesting analysis. To be clear: I’m 100% unsure of just what I think.
But I like that chess analogy a lot. You can’t hire a let expert and a const expert to write your JS for you.
There’s probably a useful sense in which the bundle of related romantic-relationship-benefits are difficult to disentangle because of human psychology (which your framing leans on?), which in turn occurs because of evolutionary history, but also a sense in which the bundle of related romantic-relationship-benefits are difficult to disentangle because of functional interconnectedness (which is still the case regardless of human psychology, if we were to magically remove jealousy). I’m not sure.
Yeah. I don’t think those two things (evolved psych priors, and functional connections) are necessarily sensibly separated, even in the limit of freely considered self-modification. Like, it’s not a coincidence that the bonds formed; maybe childrearing was the longest time scale selective pressure towards interpersonal goal alignment. That sort of cooperation is a convergent instrumental goal of life in general (in particular, of childrearing, and of life in modernity). Not obvious that we’d want to draw the boundary of what counts as “our mind updating” to exclude “evolution discovered that faith in a relationship is useful for key goals”.
I do think a lot of it comes from evolutionary imperatives. Sex came before tribes. Platonic friendships come and go but we don’t really feel emotionally hurt from them. Polyamory is a mixture of those two main types of interpersonal relationships. For polyamory to become the default, the very foundation of society has to change for children to grow up and develop a very different set of normative behaviors. Of course other aspects of life would change along with it such as who makes money for the family, the institutions that people develop their world view and grow up in such as school and workplace, etc. The current structure of our societal institutions came out of those ancient paradigms of interpersonal relationships as the distinct concept of school and workplace has existed in almost identical forms for a very long time.
Monogamy is not a human universal among hunter gatherer tribes. It’s practiced in some tribes and not in others. Evolution allowed humans to be very flexible about the kind of arragements that are possible.
I was referring to the fact that the ancestors of sapiens probably didn’t live in tribes but have developed sexual reproduction. It is also possible that the ability to feel emotions only developed after we have adopted the tribal lifestyle.
Yeah I definitely wouldn’t want to say that this framing is the whole answer—just that I found it seemed interesting / suggestive / productive of interesting analysis. To be clear: I’m 100% unsure of just what I think.
But I like that chess analogy a lot. You can’t hire a
letexpert and aconstexpert to write your JS for you.There’s probably a useful sense in which the bundle of related romantic-relationship-benefits are difficult to disentangle because of human psychology (which your framing leans on?), which in turn occurs because of evolutionary history, but also a sense in which the bundle of related romantic-relationship-benefits are difficult to disentangle because of functional interconnectedness (which is still the case regardless of human psychology, if we were to magically remove jealousy). I’m not sure.
Yeah. I don’t think those two things (evolved psych priors, and functional connections) are necessarily sensibly separated, even in the limit of freely considered self-modification. Like, it’s not a coincidence that the bonds formed; maybe childrearing was the longest time scale selective pressure towards interpersonal goal alignment. That sort of cooperation is a convergent instrumental goal of life in general (in particular, of childrearing, and of life in modernity). Not obvious that we’d want to draw the boundary of what counts as “our mind updating” to exclude “evolution discovered that faith in a relationship is useful for key goals”.
I do think a lot of it comes from evolutionary imperatives. Sex came before tribes. Platonic friendships come and go but we don’t really feel emotionally hurt from them. Polyamory is a mixture of those two main types of interpersonal relationships. For polyamory to become the default, the very foundation of society has to change for children to grow up and develop a very different set of normative behaviors. Of course other aspects of life would change along with it such as who makes money for the family, the institutions that people develop their world view and grow up in such as school and workplace, etc. The current structure of our societal institutions came out of those ancient paradigms of interpersonal relationships as the distinct concept of school and workplace has existed in almost identical forms for a very long time.
Wow, that’s so not my experience. I get hurt by those a lot.
Your experience is certainly valid. I was making a generalization in comparison to relationship with a sexual reproduction partner.
Monogamy is not a human universal among hunter gatherer tribes. It’s practiced in some tribes and not in others. Evolution allowed humans to be very flexible about the kind of arragements that are possible.
I was referring to the fact that the ancestors of sapiens probably didn’t live in tribes but have developed sexual reproduction. It is also possible that the ability to feel emotions only developed after we have adopted the tribal lifestyle.