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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7176 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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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:

  • Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
  • It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
  • For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.

Also, a rather hilarious quote from the middle:

When your partner starts dating a new person, that person can’t just have drama with your partner. They can have drama with you. And your partner can have drama with their other partner.

It gets complicated fast.

I remember once I had drama caused by my boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend (my meta-meta-meta-metamour)

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.

I recently came across this article that really cemented your view for me.

This woman lives with her husband and two side pieces and she's on her own for a startling amount of time while she's giving birth. Her husband is in no rush to make it to the delivery room:

My water broke at 5am. Plot-relevantly, I had gone to sleep only two hours prior...

I woke up my husband as the very last step – I went into his room and said “my beautiful love,” at 5:30am, which we both know full well is a crime. By nature, we keep similar hours.

He emitted a quarter-awake “you are inflicting horrible crimes on me and you are not forgiven” moan.

When I said, “I think my water broke,” he sort of flipped. Like a pancake but on its own.

“Oh!” he said.

“Nothing exciting is going to happen for a while. So I think you should get more sleep. Partners A and C are driving me to the hospital and getting me checked in.”

Later that day:

In the window where I should have eaten, the boyfriends who had brought me to the hospital had gone home to sleep, and my husband was on his way.

I had the bagel because my husband was near a bagel place and mentioned he could pick some up. It sounded like a treat, so I said yes. At the time he and I were coordinating on what he should pick up, my contractions were very slow, or hadn’t started yet. I had no idea how close the epidural was. Once he started picking things up, I watched his map location, was surprised by how slow he was, and decided not to ask for more things.

He agreed, and I went to the hospital... My husband arrived with some snacks at 1pm.

Husband goes home at some point. Next day:

Around 7am I was really panicked. I needed to course correct sharply to something else. I told my boyfriend to wake up my husband and explain to him what was going on.

To sum up:

But I cry uncontrollably when I think of how the actual moment my daughter came out of me feels like a bad drug trip. I have a blurry picture of that moment, only a few details crisp (like seeing the glowing rod coming out of a metal refinery). I remember being confused, misled, tricked into hurting myself, experiencing the birth of my daughter as a great alien rush of self betrayal, with no awareness of her, and full awareness of the people who had surrounded and outnumbered me, who did not seem to deal with me as an intelligent subject, who demanded my attention by shouting at me throughout the whole thing, barraged me with questions afterwards, questions I had already answered. I remembered the array of uniformed medical personnel around me a bluish blur of enemy forces who had worn me down and conquered me.

Indeed, managing the medical staff is the proper role of the husband in this situation. But I guess he was too tired to fully attend the brith of his child!

> going back to sleep after your pregnant wife's water broke

> lollygagging around buying snacks before showing up at the hospital

Surprisingly Chaddish attitude for someone who literally has a wife's boyfriend. Actually, two wife's boyfriends. But then again, as @HereAndGone mentioned, perhaps there was some confusion and motivational issues due to lack of paternal certainty. three_spidermen_pointing_at_each_other.jpg or Braun-Westbrook-Murray-almost-losing-uncontested-rebound.mp4, which could very well be a fresh meme from yesterday.

the people who had surrounded and outnumbered me, who did not seem to deal with me as an intelligent subject

Hmm... surely the hospital staff had no probable cause to proceed under such an impression?

Regardless of the author's particular cognitive ability (I suspect it's materially higher than average, especially higher than that of the median woman giving birth nowadays), I imagine hospital staff are trained to give clear, concise directions when things are chaotic. I suppose where the hospital staff may have failed, was to flatter and indulge her self-perceived intelligence during the birthing process.

To return to a basketball reference, if I'm coaching a basketball team and one of the players gets the ball unguarded in a corner, I'd be yelling "SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!" and not saying "Please shoot the ball. Your true shooting percentage suggests you're a good shooter and analytics have long shown that corner three-pointers are one of the most valuable shots in the game from an expected value standpoint. This ask to attempt a field goal from your current location on the floor is time sensitive. Thank you for your understanding."

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