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Notes -
I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:
Before you're born, it's already predetermined whether you're going to heaven or hell.
"So why, pastor, should I be good and righteous"
"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."
As a persuasive technique, this probably works just as good as anything. It's often difficult to tease out causality in noisy data. I point this out in the context of Scott's latest post. Look at the graphs here and tell me what you notice:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory
I notice that choosing to be monogamous or polygamous barely matters at all across many aspects of wellbeing. But there is one key difference: fertility. Polygamous people have many fewer children.
Does polygamy cause infertility or does infertility cause polygamy? Does it matter? It's extremely dysgenic and bound to go the way of the Shakers.
I wonder if polygamists have fewer children because they aren’t very likeable? Many of my polygamist/polyamorist/swinger/ethical nonmonogamist/very enlightened friends routinely post online about how awkward they are and how they hate flirting and want to just get straight to the sex (le heckin’ sexy timerinos, natch).
This mentality, as well as the idea of explicitly rejecting the concept of pair bonding, seems like anti social cope to me.
To steal man it: polies recognize that a lot of what we consider normal human interaction isn’t very enjoyable to them, and they reject it. As long as they stay inside of their ingroups, they believe this will work out well for them.
As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.
Come and poll my church and see if the people who self report as cheating on their wives are more happy in their marriage or not.
I can't remember if it was here or back when we were still on plebbit but someone posted one of Aella's polls about sexual satisfaction in marriage and the number of people here defending it with all sorts of weird rationales ("Of course representative, sexually well adjusted men follow prostitutes on Twitter and participate in their polls!") was baffling to say the least, and made me lower my already low estimation of much of the rationalist movement.
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