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It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs. I've seen a few 'big' accounts in the tpot space come out against polyamory, but the biggest one has to be the recent post that Kat Woods put on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it.
I wont summarize the whole article, but recommend you go read it. The TL;DR is:
Also, a rather hilarious quote from the middle:
In general, I think this is a continuation of the vibe shift against social experimentation within the rationalist communities, trying to push them back a bit more towards 'normal' social standards. It has been happening for quite a while, and I'm not surprised it continues to happen. My basic view is that while the experimentation and willingness to shrug off societal norms led to a lot of fascinating and good new ideas within rationalist groups, unfortunately, as always happens with these sorts of things, issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.
For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space. Some of the early and notable ones were Ziz, the whole Leverage fiasco, and then of course later on you have the highest profile issue with SBF. But these are just the most notable and even news worthy. On top of these there are dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller scale dramas that have played out in day to day life, similar to what Kat talked about above.
I actually think her point about drama scaling with more surface area in polyamory to be quite salient here. In general one of the purposes of societal norms and rules is to make sure everyone knows how they and others are supposed to act, so that arguments over constraints and less annoying and difficult. When you throw out major parts of societal norms, things get complicated very quickly.
Of course the whole polyamory issue ties into the broader culture war in many ways - notably the push back we've seen against wokeism, and the radical left more generally. I think overall the appetite people have for radically changing social norms has shrunk dramatically over the last few years. Sadly, I am not sure that necessarily means we'll go back to a healthy, stable balance. Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.
That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)
To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"
Anyway, I am curious to see where all these social norms shake out, especially with regards to relationships and dating.
I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.
Who gives a shit though? Like you say, maybe this jury-rigged relationship is the best they can get. So good luck and god bless.
I dislike the use of the word ’normalization’, I feel it grants the woke frame of living under ‘hegemonic heterosexuality’, and all the other axes of oppression. Ie, that the abnormal are oppressed. The alt right/woke right otoh, believe they should be. So they angrily debate whether normalization is a good thing or a bad thing.
But to me it is nothing. Because modern society does not, and I especially do not, oppress anyone for not being normal. So the stakes are very low.
That's what I would have said about gender woo until it swiftly moved from just being left alone into conscripting everyone else into participating in it. If people want to do something I don't approve of with their own lives, sure, that's their call, whatever, but I am now leery of pushes for normalization.
It turned out that gender woo was way more memetically contagious than (it appeared|its advocates thought|its advocates were willing to say). I think poly will prove to be as contagious or worse; we just haven't seen the floodgates from legal recognition yet so it's still "a weird SF/alt-lifestyle thing". Poly requires new people to be poly with, once the people you were seeing have moved on, and that means evangelizing to normies. And if you believe that most people are not capable of practicing poly without causing xkcd#592, this boils down to going up to people and saying, "hey, have you tried this sweet new infohazard?"
I was once briefly involved with an attractive ENM girl who only wanted something casual, and while that might sound the start of a salacious story that'll makes the reader say "tfw", it was the most stifling period in my dating life. Anyone else I wanted to see, I would have to have the "poly conversation" with, and I couldn't bring myself to do that. It just felt too much like peddling bad memes to decent women, and after I missed out on a couple of relationships with decent girls that way, I decided it was better to be single than help worsen the modern dating world.
And once I broke things off, it turned out that even a relationship that casual couldn't go back to being a friendship. Either she was only keen to hang out as friends because of the possibility of adding a sexual element to the friendship, or breaking things off hurt too much to stay friends. Whichever was true, poly opened a branch of the decision tree which only had bad outcomes.
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