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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.
There are three basic relationship scripts seen in primates (and they cover 90+% of non-primate vertebrate species as well): monogamy, harem-holding polygyny, and promiscuity*. Humans appear to have the required instincts to do all three, although monogamy appears to produce the best social outcomes. Most arrangements that exist under the umbrella of "polyamory" seem to be minor variations on one of the three. Most of the Bay Area rationalist polyamorists are in reproductively monogamous primary relationships, so their form of polyamory is basically monogamy with tolerated cheating. There is clearly a lot of "it's not a harem if the women are bi, it's a polycule" going on within polyamory, although the poly community tries to stigmatise it. But the forms of polyamory which are highest status within the community are things like "relationship anarchy" where you somehow manage to sign a lease with a partner while maintaining the sexual norms of promiscuity.
* Note that these are not particularly tied to the patriarchy/matriarchy axis. Monogamous animals are usually egalitarian, but patriarchal polygyny (gorillas, lions), matriarchal polygyny (peacoks), patriarchal promiscuity (chimps) and matriarchal promiscuity (bonobos, elephants) are all common.
Interesting to note that there are also birds that operate with matriarchal polyandry, with very skewed sex ratios and reversed sex roles. (There are other animals that are also polyandrous but I do not know how they work at all — iirc some (but not all) of them were more of a female risk-reduction, either of the female herself or for improved reproductive success)
This is quite funny since your name is Pigeon.
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