Since moving back to the Bay Area I’ve been out with four other people too, one of whom he’s also seeing; I’ve
been in my primary’s presence while he kissed one girl, and when he asked another for her phone number; I’ve gossiped
with a secondary about other persons of romantic interest and accepted his offer to hint to a guy I like that this is the case;
I hit on someone at a party right in front of my primary. I haven’t suffered a hiccup of drama or a twinge of jealousy to
speak of and all evidence (including verbal confirmation) indicates that I’ve been managing my primary’s feelings
satisfactorily too. Does this sort of thing appeal to you?
No.
But I do expect that if humans become immortal superbeings, then given enough time, most people currently in fairytale monogamous relationships will switch to poly. (Though when people are immortal superbeings, I also expect it to become common that they’ll spend a very long time if necessary searching for an instance of fairytale monogamy to be their first relationship.)
I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so), while poly and other non-traditional arrangements are the choice of the adult.
Though when people are immortal superbeings, I also expect it to become common that they’ll spend a very long time if necessary searching for an instance of fairytale monogamy to be their first relationship.
I volunteer to be the evil villain who goes about poisoning damsels and locking them up in towers so that they role play rescues by knights in shining armor. I’ll turn a few guys into beasts too in case they are feeling left out.
Oh, these damsels are going to be real damsels. No catgirl delivery for me. I’m actually kidnapping real people and locking them up in towers. That’s why I’m Evil.
It’s not? I mean, there’s some people, though probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships. But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of “poly is More Highly Evolved”. I mean, you’re then that much closer to doing things the way immortal superbeings would do it. This is why I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
I’m surprised to see Eliezer being so liberal with throwing about “More Highly Evolved”. This is a more misleading usage than what he condemns vigorously in (for example) No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices. That is, if it is not-ok to overload the ‘evolve’ word to include corporations and nano then it is definitely not-ok to stretch it to evolving to immortal superbeings either (it’s less like evolution in practice but far more like it in how the word is used).
“Immortal superbeings” aren’t more highly evolved. Evolution kind of doesn’t work very well as individuals approach immortality. More importantly even if evolution can be said to be evolving in a direction (‘higher’) it certainly wouldn’t be in the direction of immortal superbeings. Or in the direction of sexual behaviours optimised for fun. Immortal superbeings are things we as present day humans think it would be cool to be.
Poly is “something we imagine our idealized fantasy people doing”. This is some evidence about what our preferences are, along the lines of visualizing a eutopia. Particularly because it seems these immortal folks are nothing more than a target for projection. I mean, out of the set of all possible immortal superbeings how exactly was the ‘are bisexual’ trait identified? It’s certainly not an objective feature of the class, or one that all humans would attribute to them.
JoeW introduced the term, not Eliezer. It seems a bit unfair to me to criticize Eliezer for trying to continue the flow of the conversation instead of explicitly correcting JoeW in what I would consider a fairly annoying manner.
I should have added more context—the expression “more highly evolved” seems to pop up dismayingly often when talking about poly (and often bisexuality, too). I have long thought it seems to rely on notions of tribal Othering and the Geek Social Fallacies when used by poly people, but curiously it can also used by mono people being dismissive of poly.
It is so common a poly fail that if there were TV Tropes for poly, “More Highly Evolved” would be heavily referenced.
i.e. quite apart from it being arguably improper use of the term, it’s objectionable for other reasons.
I tend to groan at just about any use of the phrase “More Highly Evolved” as applicable to humans.
If the phrase means anything, it would mean something like “is in a line of descent that
has been through more rounds of Darwinian selection than some reference line”.
And since bacteria can reproduce in ~20 minutes, and it takes humans ~20 years, the
winner of that comparison is going to be in the former group, not the latter.
It is so common a poly fail that if there were TV Tropes for poly, “More Highly Evolved” would be heavily referenced.
Wait, there isn’t? That surprises me.
...
Yes there is. More than one. In fact, I expect there are pages for most of the common poly-graph combinations and potential drama producing failure modes. Tegmark needs a whole new ’verse for TvTropes concept space.
I disagree, EY has enough kudos/respect/admiration that he can consistently get away with being slightly annoying, if anything people feel a slight status boost just from him responding.
And in any case correcting people on such misleading usage is a norm here!
The sequences as they are, a chaotic web, are easiest to continue to study, once you are over a certain level, when you are corrected and the responder links to the arguments, either you update in one more area, or you find a flaw or good alternative interpretation that pushes the community one level up. I make a point of up voting people that do that, because that was what helped me read through much of the top level material.
Does the “highly” in “highly evolved” ever make sense to use? It seems like an archaic term leftover from a teleological interpretation of evolution where Homo Sapiens were the ultimate product.
I would assume that eventually the pleasurable feeling one gets from sex and love if completely separated from reproduction would slowly disappear or modified to fill something like is required in the scenario described here. Sure one can say that beings in that situation might be considered “bisexual” but is that really a useful word? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the sexes as we know them basically disappear in a world where anyone can make a descendant by themselves if they have the resources for it? Being “bisexual” dosen’t really make sense in such a context since anything like what we currently understand as biological sex is gone and is replaced by several competing reproductive strategies that only loosely fit the current distribution of reproductive strategies of the sexes.
I would probably self-modify to be asexual if it wasn’t for current societal norms and modes of reproduction. I could get much more out of my limited lifespan if I didn’t waste so much time with matters related to it. I’d rather do some math, or read more books or do some research or just explore and have fun in a virtual world.
My revealed preferences seem to match this partially as well. Mostly unrelated story: In the past I’ve actually been so disappointed when I ask people what’s the funnest thing they can imagine and I get the answer “sex”. Once I couldn’t stop myself from saying back “Come on you can do better!”. I got a blank stare and clear confusion. What is extra funny is that looking back I realize that in that particular context her answer of “sex” was clearly just one of the more obvious flirting signals that I had completely missed for over two weeks. Where in the fraking ancestral environment did I get maladaptive genes like that? Heh.
That sounds a lot like Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, in which people lose interest in most (all?) social interaction, including sex, by about age 200 and prefer mathematics.
I don’t know what people would do to get enough novelty in much longer lifespans—it’s possible that sex could be made more complex and intense as well as mathematics becoming more fascinating.
I would probably self-modify to be asexual if it wasn’t for current societal norms and modes of reproduction. I >could get much more out of my limited lifespan if I didn’t waste so much time with matters related to it. I’d rather >do some math, or read more books or do some research or just explore and have fun in a virtual world.
Speaking as the asexual reading/mathing/coding type, might I suggest that after the first several years, or at least if your sexuality finally started picking up again, you’d go back to relationships & realize why they’re all the rage? (It’s also more an orientation than a lifestyle.)
This is why I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
I’d be very interested in hearing about that hack. I haven’t been able to pull it off, myself, and also feel vaguely guilty about it. (Especially after seeing the grace and ease with which my wife pulled it off.)
What evidence do you have that immortal superbeings would be bisexual? I mean, I’d be willing to bet quite a bit on the proposition that immortal superbeings would have few if any consistent species-wide sexual preferences, since the role of sexuality in promoting reproduction would no longer be relevant at that point, due to inescapably logical demographic consequences of ‘immortality’ and the prophylactic options implied by the term ‘superbeings.’
In short, please unpack this “immortal bisexual superbeing” concept a bit more, so we can all figure out where you went wrong.
I find it plausible that immortal superbeings would be poly, but highly unlikely that they would be bisexual. My reasoning is that immortal superbeings would be unlikely to stick with the concept of gender as we understand it, thus making the labels heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual etc. obsolete at that point.
Um, that no more follows than that a hypothetical sapient mayfly can be “more highly evolved” by learning how to knit winter clothing. The problem does not apply, so the solution is not especially useful.
I don’ see from where you conclude that ” immortal superbeings would do something polyish” . Why it is not as likely that they will evolve to have a series of monogamous relationships? The science of falling and staying in love is even now quite well understood . All it takes is few hormones. (see http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/lovesex/sciencelove.htm and the references therein). By using them only when with your partner you can make a love relationship monogamous relatively easy.
That said, do you have references for ” though probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships” ? If the monogamous love is determined by hormones, which have been in humans for millions of years doesn’t it make it more likely that nowadays and few millions years future humans are more likely to be monogamous. A possible explanation for the “polypartners” people could be that because of the abundance of choice they are likely to make wrong decisions (see Human motivation :(http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/) I would expect future humans to be busy with more interesting and challenging things then finding the next sexual partner.
By the way you can experiment to hack yourself bisexual by trying to fall in love with a man with the three simple steps described in the end of the reference.
But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of “poly is More Highly Evolved”
It is? What is the assumption that immortal superbeing would chose to do such a thing based on -seeing as there are no immortal superbeings around-? Talking about biases, this does seem to be one of those case where our personal choices might influence our judgement on a problem which cannot be investigated experimentally nor framed in a suitably formal theoretical model.
While I am not against poly, I am also not persuaded that it could be called “better suited” to superbeings -the same could be said about being bisexual-. Mainly, I think that it could certainly become more accepted -what with society becoming more open-minded-, but only as a choice amongst others, not as a necessarily “superior” choice. Then again, evolution is all about being better suited to one’s environment, not about being “better” in a general term, and immortal beings would likely be freed by such external costraint, so… I guess that it would largely be up to each individual’s personal preference. What I envision is a situation akin of the one we have nowadays, but significantly more tolerant. It’s not that, simply because homosexuality is more widely accepted, “everyone” is becoming homosexual, there is just more freedom of choice, and it doesn’t make sense, to me, to look at those kind of choices as “more” or “less” evolved.
From an evolutionary point of view, polygamy doesn’t seem to be necessarily tied to “more evolved” -this is easily checked by browsing reseach in the field of ethology (through polygyny, being more common among vertebrated, has been studied far more extensively than polyandry)-. Us human being, being what you might call the “peak” of this process, are largely monogamous, unlike, for example, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Furthermore, consider that anchient Greeks were largely bisexuals, and look at the situation nowadays, after Illuminism, and with a singificantly larger life span. Those kind of choices does not seem to be tied to cultural or byological evolution. Tolerance for different life choices is.
What is the assumption that immortal superbeing would chose to do such a thing based on -seeing as there are no immortal superbeings around-?
I imagine the chief benefit of monogamy is that you don’t need to compete for the limited resources of attention, and affection, and reproductive/nurturing capacity from the person you love—a sense of competition which can manifest itself in feelings of sexual jealousy, possessiveness, etc.
Now imagine a hypothetical future scenario in which those resources are effectively unlimited; in the sense that each person is perfectly capable of perceiving the need/desires of their prospective partners, and satisfying them as best as possible, with capacity to spare; in which you don’t need to compete for reproductive capacity or material resources are plentiful.
The benefits of monogamy then seem nullified, the benefits of polyamory seem without a downside to them.
That having been said, something being “evolved” in the sense of “What Would Immortal Superbeings Do” seems rather useless in determining what current-day people should do given their current-day emotional and physical circumstances.
Now imagine a hypothetical future scenario in which those resources are effectively unlimited; in the sense that each person is perfectly capable of perceiving the need/desires of their prospective partners, and satisfying them as best as possible, with capacity to spare; in which you don’t need to compete for reproductive capacity or material resources are plentiful.
I think that would only be possible if the whole human race had the attentional resources to be a group marriage. I’m not sure it makes sense to say that everyone could be that good at modelling everyone one else.
My imagination only extends to raising Dunbar’s number to 300, and I think that even that would produce large but hard to specify social changes.
Can you please use the standard quotation method of adding ‘>’ before the text you’re quoting? Those big letters are annoying. And why did you delete your account?
I wanted a new username. As for the big characters, I am aware that they are annoying, but I didn’t know that using # would have had that effect, and now I don’t know how to reverse it.
Well, if you had not deleted your account, you could just edit your comment and replaced them with ‘>’.
Are you blind (or otherwise visually impaired) by any chance? If not, it seems strange that you didn’t notice the effect after the first comment you made.
No, I am not blind. Through,I wear glassed. No, that’s not the reason I didn’t correct it before. It seems like the # character triggers that affect only if used in a whole new paragraph, otherwise it simply prints #phrase#. Initially, I thought that it was a side-effect of quoting a phrase of the text whose user I was replying to. All things considered, I didn’t think it was that annoying, it’s not as if I wanted to irritate you specifically.
It’s no biggie. You can click the “Help” link at the bottom right corner of the reply form, to see some notes about syntax (many people fail to notice that link).
Editors can edit top level posts but have no access to comments. I could ban them, but they have useful content that doesn’t deserve to be hidden entirely.
I don’t think this is the right place to report this, but I don’t know where the right place is, and this is closest. In the title of the page for comments for the deleted account (eg) the name of the poster has not been redacted.
probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships
If you’re using “monogamous closed” here to mean “no cheating behaviour” then many studies widely report this is well under half of the coupled (presumably Western, first world) population. I’m not aware of any studies on genuinely monogamous inclination.
But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of “poly is More Highly Evolved”
I must be missing something here; I read this as a circular argument.
This is why I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
If you have more words here I would read with great interest. Again, I must be missing something, because it seems to me a similar argument could be made for immortal superbeings also enjoying every food and music type because that would similarly maximise the likelihood of obtaining food- and music-derived utility.
I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so)
And yet, the vast majority of poly people are well under 200 years old… I doubt they would agree with you on what is optimal for them.
I suppose you could counter that the vast majority of people under 200 years old are monogamous, but that seems more due to monogamy’s enormous head-start in modern western culture than due to what is optimal for the young.
No.
But I do expect that if humans become immortal superbeings, then given enough time, most people currently in fairytale monogamous relationships will switch to poly. (Though when people are immortal superbeings, I also expect it to become common that they’ll spend a very long time if necessary searching for an instance of fairytale monogamy to be their first relationship.)
I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so), while poly and other non-traditional arrangements are the choice of the adult.
I volunteer to be the evil villain who goes about poisoning damsels and locking them up in towers so that they role play rescues by knights in shining armor. I’ll turn a few guys into beasts too in case they are feeling left out.
Thank you for volunteering this invaluable service ^_^
Relevant.
Oh, these damsels are going to be real damsels. No catgirl delivery for me. I’m actually kidnapping real people and locking them up in towers. That’s why I’m Evil.
sounds like my weekend.
I note that this treads close to a well-established poly fail: the notion that poly is More Highly Evolved.
It’s not? I mean, there’s some people, though probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships. But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of “poly is More Highly Evolved”. I mean, you’re then that much closer to doing things the way immortal superbeings would do it. This is why I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
I’m surprised to see Eliezer being so liberal with throwing about “More Highly Evolved”. This is a more misleading usage than what he condemns vigorously in (for example) No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices. That is, if it is not-ok to overload the ‘evolve’ word to include corporations and nano then it is definitely not-ok to stretch it to evolving to immortal superbeings either (it’s less like evolution in practice but far more like it in how the word is used).
“Immortal superbeings” aren’t more highly evolved. Evolution kind of doesn’t work very well as individuals approach immortality. More importantly even if evolution can be said to be evolving in a direction (‘higher’) it certainly wouldn’t be in the direction of immortal superbeings. Or in the direction of sexual behaviours optimised for fun. Immortal superbeings are things we as present day humans think it would be cool to be.
Poly is “something we imagine our idealized fantasy people doing”. This is some evidence about what our preferences are, along the lines of visualizing a eutopia. Particularly because it seems these immortal folks are nothing more than a target for projection. I mean, out of the set of all possible immortal superbeings how exactly was the ‘are bisexual’ trait identified? It’s certainly not an objective feature of the class, or one that all humans would attribute to them.
JoeW introduced the term, not Eliezer. It seems a bit unfair to me to criticize Eliezer for trying to continue the flow of the conversation instead of explicitly correcting JoeW in what I would consider a fairly annoying manner.
I should have added more context—the expression “more highly evolved” seems to pop up dismayingly often when talking about poly (and often bisexuality, too). I have long thought it seems to rely on notions of tribal Othering and the Geek Social Fallacies when used by poly people, but curiously it can also used by mono people being dismissive of poly.
It is so common a poly fail that if there were TV Tropes for poly, “More Highly Evolved” would be heavily referenced.
i.e. quite apart from it being arguably improper use of the term, it’s objectionable for other reasons.
I tend to groan at just about any use of the phrase “More Highly Evolved” as applicable to humans. If the phrase means anything, it would mean something like “is in a line of descent that has been through more rounds of Darwinian selection than some reference line”. And since bacteria can reproduce in ~20 minutes, and it takes humans ~20 years, the winner of that comparison is going to be in the former group, not the latter.
Wait, there isn’t? That surprises me.
...
Yes there is. More than one. In fact, I expect there are pages for most of the common poly-graph combinations and potential drama producing failure modes. Tegmark needs a whole new ’verse for TvTropes concept space.
Heh. I was thinking of an entire site devoted to poly tropes. But now you have me considering what that would look like.
I disagree, EY has enough kudos/respect/admiration that he can consistently get away with being slightly annoying, if anything people feel a slight status boost just from him responding.
And in any case correcting people on such misleading usage is a norm here!
The sequences as they are, a chaotic web, are easiest to continue to study, once you are over a certain level, when you are corrected and the responder links to the arguments, either you update in one more area, or you find a flaw or good alternative interpretation that pushes the community one level up. I make a point of up voting people that do that, because that was what helped me read through much of the top level material.
Does the “highly” in “highly evolved” ever make sense to use? It seems like an archaic term leftover from a teleological interpretation of evolution where Homo Sapiens were the ultimate product.
I would assume that eventually the pleasurable feeling one gets from sex and love if completely separated from reproduction would slowly disappear or modified to fill something like is required in the scenario described here. Sure one can say that beings in that situation might be considered “bisexual” but is that really a useful word? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the sexes as we know them basically disappear in a world where anyone can make a descendant by themselves if they have the resources for it? Being “bisexual” dosen’t really make sense in such a context since anything like what we currently understand as biological sex is gone and is replaced by several competing reproductive strategies that only loosely fit the current distribution of reproductive strategies of the sexes.
I would probably self-modify to be asexual if it wasn’t for current societal norms and modes of reproduction. I could get much more out of my limited lifespan if I didn’t waste so much time with matters related to it. I’d rather do some math, or read more books or do some research or just explore and have fun in a virtual world.
My revealed preferences seem to match this partially as well. Mostly unrelated story: In the past I’ve actually been so disappointed when I ask people what’s the funnest thing they can imagine and I get the answer “sex”. Once I couldn’t stop myself from saying back “Come on you can do better!”. I got a blank stare and clear confusion. What is extra funny is that looking back I realize that in that particular context her answer of “sex” was clearly just one of the more obvious flirting signals that I had completely missed for over two weeks. Where in the fraking ancestral environment did I get maladaptive genes like that? Heh.
Quite possibly not enough of your ancestors died before reproducing, leaving insufficient optimization pressure. :P
Damn you insufficiently culled ancestors!
That sounds a lot like Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, in which people lose interest in most (all?) social interaction, including sex, by about age 200 and prefer mathematics.
I don’t know what people would do to get enough novelty in much longer lifespans—it’s possible that sex could be made more complex and intense as well as mathematics becoming more fascinating.
Speaking as the asexual reading/mathing/coding type, might I suggest that after the first several years, or at least if your sexuality finally started picking up again, you’d go back to relationships & realize why they’re all the rage? (It’s also more an orientation than a lifestyle.)
Somebody needs to produce bumper-stickers that read “What Would A Bisexual Immortal Superbeing Do?”
You mean what would Loki do?
It’s not entirely clear that those wouldn’t be the original stickers in the “WW[X]D?” series by another name.
I’d be very interested in hearing about that hack. I haven’t been able to pull it off, myself, and also feel vaguely guilty about it. (Especially after seeing the grace and ease with which my wife pulled it off.)
So am I. We are talking about the “becoming an immortal superbeing” hack, right?
I was not, no. :-)
(But if you know that one, too, please share.)
See here.
What evidence do you have that immortal superbeings would be bisexual? I mean, I’d be willing to bet quite a bit on the proposition that immortal superbeings would have few if any consistent species-wide sexual preferences, since the role of sexuality in promoting reproduction would no longer be relevant at that point, due to inescapably logical demographic consequences of ‘immortality’ and the prophylactic options implied by the term ‘superbeings.’
In short, please unpack this “immortal bisexual superbeing” concept a bit more, so we can all figure out where you went wrong.
I find it plausible that immortal superbeings would be poly, but highly unlikely that they would be bisexual. My reasoning is that immortal superbeings would be unlikely to stick with the concept of gender as we understand it, thus making the labels heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual etc. obsolete at that point.
Um, that no more follows than that a hypothetical sapient mayfly can be “more highly evolved” by learning how to knit winter clothing. The problem does not apply, so the solution is not especially useful.
I don’ see from where you conclude that ” immortal superbeings would do something polyish” . Why it is not as likely that they will evolve to have a series of monogamous relationships? The science of falling and staying in love is even now quite well understood . All it takes is few hormones. (see http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/lovesex/sciencelove.htm and the references therein). By using them only when with your partner you can make a love relationship monogamous relatively easy.
That said, do you have references for ” though probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships” ? If the monogamous love is determined by hormones, which have been in humans for millions of years doesn’t it make it more likely that nowadays and few millions years future humans are more likely to be monogamous. A possible explanation for the “polypartners” people could be that because of the abundance of choice they are likely to make wrong decisions (see Human motivation :(http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/) I would expect future humans to be busy with more interesting and challenging things then finding the next sexual partner.
By the way you can experiment to hack yourself bisexual by trying to fall in love with a man with the three simple steps described in the end of the reference.
But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of “poly is More Highly Evolved”
It is? What is the assumption that immortal superbeing would chose to do such a thing based on -seeing as there are no immortal superbeings around-? Talking about biases, this does seem to be one of those case where our personal choices might influence our judgement on a problem which cannot be investigated experimentally nor framed in a suitably formal theoretical model.
While I am not against poly, I am also not persuaded that it could be called “better suited” to superbeings -the same could be said about being bisexual-. Mainly, I think that it could certainly become more accepted -what with society becoming more open-minded-, but only as a choice amongst others, not as a necessarily “superior” choice. Then again, evolution is all about being better suited to one’s environment, not about being “better” in a general term, and immortal beings would likely be freed by such external costraint, so… I guess that it would largely be up to each individual’s personal preference. What I envision is a situation akin of the one we have nowadays, but significantly more tolerant. It’s not that, simply because homosexuality is more widely accepted, “everyone” is becoming homosexual, there is just more freedom of choice, and it doesn’t make sense, to me, to look at those kind of choices as “more” or “less” evolved.
From an evolutionary point of view, polygamy doesn’t seem to be necessarily tied to “more evolved” -this is easily checked by browsing reseach in the field of ethology (through polygyny, being more common among vertebrated, has been studied far more extensively than polyandry)-. Us human being, being what you might call the “peak” of this process, are largely monogamous, unlike, for example, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Furthermore, consider that anchient Greeks were largely bisexuals, and look at the situation nowadays, after Illuminism, and with a singificantly larger life span. Those kind of choices does not seem to be tied to cultural or byological evolution. Tolerance for different life choices is.
I imagine the chief benefit of monogamy is that you don’t need to compete for the limited resources of attention, and affection, and reproductive/nurturing capacity from the person you love—a sense of competition which can manifest itself in feelings of sexual jealousy, possessiveness, etc.
Now imagine a hypothetical future scenario in which those resources are effectively unlimited; in the sense that each person is perfectly capable of perceiving the need/desires of their prospective partners, and satisfying them as best as possible, with capacity to spare; in which you don’t need to compete for reproductive capacity or material resources are plentiful.
The benefits of monogamy then seem nullified, the benefits of polyamory seem without a downside to them.
That having been said, something being “evolved” in the sense of “What Would Immortal Superbeings Do” seems rather useless in determining what current-day people should do given their current-day emotional and physical circumstances.
I think that would only be possible if the whole human race had the attentional resources to be a group marriage. I’m not sure it makes sense to say that everyone could be that good at modelling everyone one else.
My imagination only extends to raising Dunbar’s number to 300, and I think that even that would produce large but hard to specify social changes.
Can you please use the standard quotation method of adding ‘>’ before the text you’re quoting? Those big letters are annoying. And why did you delete your account?
I wanted a new username. As for the big characters, I am aware that they are annoying, but I didn’t know that using # would have had that effect, and now I don’t know how to reverse it.
Well, if you had not deleted your account, you could just edit your comment and replaced them with ‘>’.
Are you blind (or otherwise visually impaired) by any chance? If not, it seems strange that you didn’t notice the effect after the first comment you made.
His point wasn’t that he couldn’t see it, it was that he didn’t know how to change it.
It’s probably worth a longer essay, but confusions between what people can perceive and what they can change aren’t exactly rare.
No, I am not blind. Through,I wear glassed. No, that’s not the reason I didn’t correct it before. It seems like the # character triggers that affect only if used in a whole new paragraph, otherwise it simply prints #phrase#. Initially, I thought that it was a side-effect of quoting a phrase of the text whose user I was replying to. All things considered, I didn’t think it was that annoying, it’s not as if I wanted to irritate you specifically.
It’s no biggie. You can click the “Help” link at the bottom right corner of the reply form, to see some notes about syntax (many people fail to notice that link).
For what it’s worth, while I didn’t take it personally, I do find it distracting.
I’m not sure whether it makes more sense for you to correct it or to leave it in place so that the comments about it will make sense.
I changed account, so that’s not really an option. If I could change it, I certainly would.
I think someone has the right to edit other people’s posts, perhaps ask them?
Editors can edit top level posts but have no access to comments. I could ban them, but they have useful content that doesn’t deserve to be hidden entirely.
I don’t think this is the right place to report this, but I don’t know where the right place is, and this is closest. In the title of the page for comments for the deleted account (eg) the name of the poster has not been redacted.
If someone has the ability to fix it, the by all means. I woulnd’t know who to ask, though.
If you’re using “monogamous closed” here to mean “no cheating behaviour” then many studies widely report this is well under half of the coupled (presumably Western, first world) population. I’m not aware of any studies on genuinely monogamous inclination.
I must be missing something here; I read this as a circular argument.
If you have more words here I would read with great interest. Again, I must be missing something, because it seems to me a similar argument could be made for immortal superbeings also enjoying every food and music type because that would similarly maximise the likelihood of obtaining food- and music-derived utility.
I’d expect it to go in cycles.
And yet, the vast majority of poly people are well under 200 years old… I doubt they would agree with you on what is optimal for them.
I suppose you could counter that the vast majority of people under 200 years old are monogamous, but that seems more due to monogamy’s enormous head-start in modern western culture than due to what is optimal for the young.