Back when I was in the market, I found that asking male geeks whose sexual preference I didn't know on dates worked pretty well. Not, admittedly, the most efficient possible mechanism... and not entirely reliable, as it landed me a few dates with self-identified straight male geeks, which puzzled me... but still, it worked pretty well.

Of course, I only tried this for male geeks I was interested in dating, which may have introduced relevant selection biases.

The studies I know of have found that while many people can identify orientation (EDIT: sorry, only gay/straight, don't know of any non-binary studies) based on facial appearance, voice, and other outward signs with better-than-average accuracy, participants tend to have a hard time identifying specific traits that led them to judge.

I also would be interested in any such result.

I am hard pressed to think of any nerd females I've known well enough to observe them in any detail, who I would actually consider non-pretty.

I'm torn about saying this because this kind of message probably good for everyone's self-esteem and I think nerdy girls on average should be more confident, but... what's with all these pretty nerds? Is your standard for pretty relatively low or are you just really lucky? In my experience and in common stereotype nerds of both genders are, on average, less physically attractive than the rest of the population, once you control for socio-economic conditions that influence things like diet, hygiene and exercise. Good looking people tend to end up on anti-nerd life paths earlier in life, less good looking people have less of their time taken up by socializing leaving them with more time for nerdy activities and more incentive to develop other aspects of themselves (since they can't coast on physical attractiveness). I've consistently found that less physically attractive people are more intellectually interesting.

This doesn't mean your advice is bad- nerdy girls are awesome and totally are capable of getting together with lots of nerdy guys. But I don't think we need to mythologize the nerdy female this way and it seems a bit patronizing to pretend the self-assessment of nerdy women has no grounding in reality. Just like how not everyone gets to be smart, not everyone gets to be physically attractive.

Weirdly enough, I know someone who had their face seriously damaged (albeit not to the ludicrous extent shown by Two-Face) and he reported that it actually made him much more sexually successful, since it gave him an instant conversation starter with just about anyone and the story of how he got it painted him in a very good light.

Even if you do have half your face burned off a la Two-Face in the Batman series, being visibly smart and funny will boost your apparent prettiness by quite a lot.

I find that most people have some things attractive about them. If they are interesting and kindly disposed toward me, it is not hard to focus on the attractive features, and blur out the less attractive features. It works very much like the affective death spiral, but with no real negative consequences.

Once you find enough things attractive about someone, you enter the spiral, and you begin to notice the very attractive square line of Harvey's non-burned jaw, and just don't even notice the scary skeletor burn face anymore, or you might even find little parts of it that start to look interesting to you.

Well, this all assumes a counter-fictional Harvey that doesn't go fully dark-side, or recovers at some point to something like his former moral and mental self.

A lot of people say that it's easy. They never say how to do it. It's like they thought just saying "It's easy" constituted a viable explanation of the method.

Also, I'm not really interested in casual sex, so if you're right that serious relationships are much harder, that's a problem.

You're suggesting the girls think they are unattractive because their unclear non-verbal signaling fails to yield positive feedback from men? This is plausible though Eliezer also mentioned nerdy men who are notoriously bad in this regard.

This is the best free, online resource I know of. But there are tons of books, even courses out there.

Nope. Not sure what to tell you if you're not already aware this isn't so.

Maybe a study documenting it?

There are not such things as suggestive glances, eye-locking, inviting postures, etc.?

Well, sure -- but other people would likely have found him more interesting. Congratulations on things having worked out for you, of course, but there are a lot of other good people who each of you could have married.

Finding good romantic partners is very probabilistic. Does increased masculinity increase a man's expected attractiveness to a random person? I think that, for men who aren't already very masculine, it definitely does.

I have the feeling that this may not be the best post to show people who are predisposed to dislike rationality.

This is a little bit more complex.

Sexual desires are not a constant for each invidual person.

It seems (in the poly community) that awesome sexual experiences with one partner make one want more sexual things with the other partners rather than less.

Another, seperate point on biology:

The 5 women that are spending so much time with this alpha male will find their menstrual cycles becoming synchronised (assuming, of course, that they allow natural menstrual cycling). This will therefore mean that they are all at their most sexually active simultaneously.

Assuming that the peak sex drive of a woman is more than 1/5 of the constant male sex drive, this means that at least one of those 5 women will be unsatisfied during her days of peak sex-drive.

Which is an important fact in the context.

In other words, to make all members of a poly society equally sexually satisfied, this society must have more women than men.

Or you could just adjust the bisexuality / homosexuality rates... I dare say an all-men all-homosexual polyamorous group would have to be entirely stable, at least so long as we're playing entirely to gender stereotypes.

(Is there any actual research about women being less interested in sex, by the way? I've heard that dismissed as a myth a few times, born primarily of cultural conditioning, but never with any actual research either way)

In other words, to make all members of a poly society equally sexually satisfied, this society must have more women than men. With the same number of women than men, less successful men will be frustrated, even if all women are satisfied.

This is possible, though I would note that sex is just one of the things one gets from a romantic relationship. Even if a poly society would leave more men without sex, it might provide more men with things such as close companionship. It is not obvious which one is more important. (Companionship is far more important than sex for me, though I'm probably atypical for a male in that regard.)

It seems like most men do not want to invest much resources into child that is not biologically theirs.

I will note that, from my own reading, I am under the impression that (among animals in general) males will invest resources in any child that might be theirs, while ignoring/killing only those children that are definitely not.

As such I would be moderately surprised to discover that humans differed from this pattern, and cared only for children of known paternity.

If we assume that men have stronger sex drive

I have come across a report of empirical observations that directly contradicts this assumption:

In his book "Polyamory: Roadmaps For The Clueless And Hopeful", Anthony D. Ravenscroft states the observation that women have the stronger sex drive - It takes 3 men per women to get the women fully satisfied.

If you're saying that the kinds of people who typically wish to be poly are the kinds of people who typically don't want children, that might be so, though I haven't seen any evidence for that hypothesis. Anecdotally, the "wants children" / "doesn't want children" ratio seems about the same as in the general population, or maybe as in the general high-IQ population. Your original comment seemed to talk about the suitability of poly for raising children, given that the people involved want children, though.

But I actually think that the main benefit of having three parents is for the adults, not the kids. Child-raising is typically really, really tiring, at least when the children are still young enough to need constant supervision. Having a third person around would really help make things easier. At the same time, there are all kinds of studies around saying that most of the things we'd expect to have an impact on the long-term outcomes of the children actually don't, and I'd guess that this would fall into the same category.

I'll call people on the offensive tropes not because I feel responsible on behalf of the Poly Conspiracy to do so, but because they are offensive tropes.

I do too, when I encounter them in my social sphere (it's not merely offensive in my view, it's just a painfully stupid idea). What I dislike is the implied obligation to police a group of people with whom my only assured point of commonality is our nonmonogamy for their painfully stupid and/or offensive ideas so that a monogamous person feels better about poly people as a whole. How they feel about us is not my responsibility, and I'm already acting to counteract the stupid ideas bothering them for my own reasons.

I have said that poly doesn't mean no jealousy; poly means additional tools in the repertoire with which to deal > with jealousy.

That seems like an accurate summary.

As to the comments re: child custody, yeah, I'm aware of how grim it is for poly parents involved in a custody battle. :\ Several friends of mine have suffered for it, and a few remain on guard against the possibility.

Leslie Marmon Silko is a good source there, re: pre-Christianization (and to some degree mid-and post-) sexual practices.

However, the question remains of how it's in the individual parents' interests to enter into a given family arrangement. When it's not, they won't have kids, and the eventual parenting outcome remains moot; if moms and > dads don't want to do it, it won't happen.

I'd find that an easier statement to accept if I didn't see many, many people routinely make decisions about parenting (or becoming parents) that did not appear to involve such analysis. The only times I've seen parents really think and act the way you describe, was when they were financially-stable and comfortable enough in status from the start that any such alterations would change that (and even then, many of them wind up divorcing anyway if things go poorly instead of staying together for the kids' sake, something which may or may not be in the child's best interest as well). And even then, I've seen parents in such situations adopt polyamory or whatever; either they don't agree with your assessment, or they're not thinking about the decision in those terms in the first place.

(FYI: This is what I meant re: your theoretical understanding of human sexuality -- it's not an attack on you, it's just me stating you appear to have an understanding of how people behave in these situations that's informed more by your big-picture theoretical beliefs about human behavior, than by a direct assessment of how people really behave -- at the very worst, I am accusing you of generalizing too broadly beyond the scope of what you know).

Leslie Marmon Silko's writing.

Also, one little society isn't a very impressive track record. Monogamous societies and polygynous societies have ruled continents.

Captains of football teams and cheerleaders do not want to be the 'primaries' of lots of people. That's an awful lot of work. They also wouldn't make particularly good primaries - given that they are always so busy fucking other people. Furthermore, when it comes to 'primary' status they will want to reserve that for people who they gain status for being affiliated with - other elites.

Plots which are just about people not being rational are a subspecies of "Idiot Plots". Plots which are about people not behaving like SF con-goers are "Muggle Plots".

I don't really see the inherent superiority idea. Seems like there should be plenty of interesting ways to mess up everything with polyamory and transhumanism as well as with monogamy and bioconservatism, just like muggles and wizards both have failure modes, just different.

I thought for a while, and I really can't imagine any cases of works which would be unsuitable for all LWers that arn't worth hanging around and arguing about. I agree. We should be calling these people ignorant and criticising their work, not assigning them a permanent class division, shaking our heads, and going back to our camp.

Not what I'd call a Muggle Plot, no. See also, The Fate of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Can be read without its predecessor novel.

I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling. Of course nothing's actually gone wrong in my immediate poly family yet. You can easily see how this could go wrong.

And from my side I can see how it could go right. I visited Berkeley recently (bootcamp) and it was adorable.

I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling.

There aren't many places where people would be comfortable making that comparison! But I suppose if it wasn't for the inbreeding risk, Westermarck effect and massive potential for abuse incest would be the perfect family bonding activity. You're living with each other already!

But, based on Alicorn's own experience, even she would feel "...skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist.", in the case of more than 3 "primary" partners. I guess that despite the cliche "there is enough love for everyone", in practice it wouldn't be realistic to expect a single person to share his attention/interest equally among n people, if n became too high.

Could you give some examples of how they do feel sufficiently differentiated? It is not clear to me how it works in practice, and while I could imagine scenarios, I don't trust my own imaginative accuracy when it comes to imagining much about poly relationships.

Thanks.

#Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn't have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?#

To quote Alicorn's original post:

#I want to be someone's top romantic priority, ideally symmetrically. [This is satisfied by me and MBlume having an explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones.]#

We are talking about a real need, a real issue here. While I consider the answer essentially correct, I also feel that dismissing the implied concern out of hand, as if it was not there to be considered, would be a mistake (after all, many of those considering polygamy are bound to feel that same way). Note that, as remarked, even here we have different levels, different shades, there is a difference between being someone's top romantic priorities and just a generic "one of the many".

I guess that what the original poster meant was "unique", "exclusive", rather than "special". Alicorn's post remaked that being the "top" romantic priority is 95% of the deal. The fact that the relationship is not "unique", but that you are just one of two, six, n romantic interests might make someone feel as if they were easily repleaceable, interchangeable like a car's wheel, whereas, in fact, the feelings of those involved are no less real or intense. Simply because there are others just like you does not mean that you don't matter to your partner. In other words, it does not make you "not special", only "not unique", which, to some people, might appear like the same thing, but it is not.

The problem lies in that remaining 5% that distinguish "top" from "exclusive" romantic interest. To some people, that uniqueness -the fact that the bond is unique, involved only you and your partner, and no one else- is something special and valuable in an of itself. The fact of the matter is that the value one places on exclusivity is highly subjective, everyone has to draw their own conclusions.

An unstated question that emerges in these two points is "can two people be fully satisfied with only each other?" -the original poster seemed to imply (I apologize if that was not the case) that the very need to have a relationship with other people besides the current partner means that said partner is not the "right" person, otherwise you wouldn't feel unsatisfied (as I heard in the past, essentially using artificial measures to keep up a relationship that should have ended ages ago)-.

While I don't completely agree with that, I must say that I would likely not consider polygamy simply because of some feeling of boredom I might end up feeling in the future. In general, in that respect, I must say that I don't see poly as the panacea to save a not completely satisfactory relationship. In my opinion, it would be entirely possible for two people to be satisfied with each other without resorting to outside partners. Communication is the real issue, here -without that, even with ten different partners one would never be able to have a functioning relationship-. So, I don't necessarily see polygamy as the answer to lack of interest in an existing relationship, nor as some sort of magical solution that would ensure the surivival of a future one.

To put it simply, you could very well feel lonely in a crowd.

If nothing else, the increased number of people involved would make it harder to cope with possible attritions/jealousies that might arise in the future. It's all to easy to imagine the potential problems: your partner having a fight with her partner, and being irritable when she is with you, her partner becoming jealous with her and your relationship,... the mere fact that there are more people, and more variables to consider, make the list of "things that could go wrong" that much longer, negating pretty much any perceived advantage one might think to gain from such an arrangement, simply because of the increasingly complex dynamics.

Again, to summarize, put enough people together, and you will most likely end up saying something that one of them disagrees with. It's all too easy hurting someone without meaning to, even if you know him very well, and that problem is magnified if you increase the number of people involved (at least in my experience).

In the end, the only point I disagree with is the fact that polygamy might necessarily be the best way to have a satisfactory, lasting relationship. In my experience, that had not been the case, and in general, I think that, as a possible arrangement, it's not without its own share of problems, albeit different ones. It's not necessarily superior to a monogamous relationship, just... different. I guess that what I am trying to say is, don't expect it to be a magical solution to all of your problems, without proper communication, it will fail, just like anything else.

To quote Alicorn:

• I think I could have lived with being a member of a triad without explicit rankings; other arrangements would have been progressively less appealing and at some point I would have been necessarily skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist.

So I would guess, it all depends on the situation. Are we talking about a "primary" relationship, etc. I guess that at a certain point you could, presumably, start to quetion your role and importance in the relationship.

The thought of my partner sharing a particular level of connection (poorly specified, but I know it when I see it / imagine it) with another person triggers typical primate challenge behaviors in me. E.g., violence toward the other male. Along with feelings of having been hurt. Since I'm special to my partner, the implication is that she wouldn't want to make me feel hurt and highly violent.

You've never felt romantic jealousy? Or did you hack it away like Alicorn?

For males who do not share this trait, I wonder on the mechanism, and whether it might have some relation to measures of testosterone. Probably too simplistic, but a study I'd like to see nonetheless.

Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me.

But the reality is that they always have other options.

To be perfecly fair, from my relatively brief poly experience, there is also the other half of the coin: the disappointment of not being the one said partner choses, the potential jealousy (irrational, but, undenyably not exactly an emotion that can be controlled at will), and, as Alicorn's post highlighted, the fear of losing said partner -breakups do happen, and, in relation to another post, the situation between a mother and her sons is quite different because that bond does not fit this particular requirement-.

That is a new, interesting perspective to me. Thank you for joining in. (Thanks to all the poly folks who have been replying to me. Very cool, very helpful.)

I agree with most of what you say here. I did not intend to imply you ought to feel or behave a certain way, so apologies if it seemed that way. I just don't/didn't understand, and would like to. Thanks for chiming in. (Didn't realize how many poly folks were on the message board.)

I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?

I didn't understand this line of argument before I was poly, and I don't understand it now. Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they're individually less special to you! You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each, and you aren't even culturally allowed to have a favorite! There's a sense in which you "love them all equally", sure, but I'd be willing to bet that something like 75% of parents would be unable to claim that under Veritaserum.

As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different. It's a conceit of our current sensibilities that we even use the same word to refer to how we feel about those, our siblings, our pets, and ice cream. There is no reason in principle why we couldn't have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.

I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?

Not the best example. Does it never happen that one child suffers because he feels that his sibling is "stealing" his parent's attention away from him? It's something I have seen it happen before, even when the mother does love her sons equally -while her love might remain, the same could no longer be said about her "undivided" attention, which is what causes the problem in young children, when they are informed that they are going to have "a little brother"-. While it is not a rationally sound stance, that kind of jealousy is certainly not an uncommon emotion.

Furthermore, does it never happen that one of the sibling feels slighted because he is constantly compared to his more successful brother? While the mother might, in theory, love them both equally, life is not always as it looks on paper. It's not uncommon to have a situation where there is a "preferred" child (maybe because he excells in sports, like the father, whereas the other brother doesn't even like football, and prefers classical music).

To put it clearly, it's also something Alicorn also underlined: # Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary. #. She later decided that the odds of that happening are lower than those that things might go wrong simply because of loss of interest. However, that does not mean that one should dimiss such concern out of hand with a "I don't know why you would say this", as if the fear of abandonment was not a real, "natural" emotion. Ultimately, the children in the example will always remain that mother's sons, no matter what. A romantic relationship is not like that. Breakups do exist, it's not as if the possibility that he/she might decide to pursue a monogamous relationship with a partner he/she met at a later date is might be a realistic concern. Not a concern that should necessarily stop you from pursuing a polygamous relationship, but certainly a concern to be considered.

I mean, I am just going off a tangent, here, but, first of all, we are comparing two very different kind of situations -the bond between a mother and a son, and the bond between two lovers-. While we might address the two bonds with the same words (love), that is, as Wittgensteing might have said, a mere problem of language -in practice, the romantic love between two people is different from what a child feels towards a parent, or a parent towards a child, or a sibling towards a brother-.

For example, take the bond between three siblings. If their parents were having another child, the relationship betweent he three children would not be affected -it's not as if what they feel towards each other would be changed by the arrival of a little brother-. On the other hand, in the case of a "best friend", it is implicitly assumed that the "position" is unique, exclusive. One cannot have many "best friends", one can have many "close friends". In and of itself, the position of "best friend" implies exclusivity, thought it might often be compared to the bond between brothers.

This is a fact that was also highligthed in the original post by Alcyon: she highlights the fact that there is a difference between being someone's "top" romantic priority and being someone's "exclusive" romantic priority. As she puts it, the first part is 95% of the deal. However, I ALSO agree with Eliezer_Yudkowsky's post:

Yes. Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn't have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?

The fact that he/she might be seeing other people does not automatically imply that you don't matter to her/him. Nor does it imply that what your share is any less real. However, it all boils down to how much value we attach to that last 5% that distinguishes "top romantic interest" from "exclusive romantic interest". Because "unique", "exclusive" obviously do not apply when the "position" is shared by two, six, n other people. At the same time, that does not mean that you should feel as if you were easily replaceable, like a car's wheel. You are still a person. Your partner chose to be with you because he/she feels something for you. You just have to decide how much value you place on the fact that the relationship you share should be truly "unique", "exclusive", keeping in mind that there is no right or wrong, best or worse decision here.

I don't know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.

Have you ever felt jealousy? Romantic or otherwise? I don't feel it over my partner finding someone else attractive -- that's too distant and automatic to be a threat -- but a pursued relationship with someone else is too much of a threat to my relationship. I also don't see this as an unfounded insecurity that I should work on reducing; if you're more secure in your primary relationship than I would be in a poly scenario, I feel like you may not be updating sufficiently given available information about human relationships.

Why should it be so different for lovers?

Having multiple children doesn't threaten the loss of your previous children. That's why.

Interesting benefit of polyamory: [...]

I accept that this may be true for you. It does not appear to be true of most of the poly folks I've come across. I have seen a lot of drama and boat-rocking and boat-sinking. Hell, it just happened again, publicly, in Tortuga.

It is possible that I have not come across a proper representative sample of poly relationships and have an inaccurate view. But I remain skeptical of your claim to this benefit for poly.

Thank you for your perspective on the matter. I feel a bit like an anthropologist dropped into a foreign land.

I will be better able to answer the question if you unpack the words "special" and "replaceable".

I'll try. Not sure I'll succeed, though, as it screams obviousness to my brain, so it's hard to understand the outside perspective wherein it is not clear.

A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).

I enjoy feeling like I am more important to my partner than anyone/anything else. I am under the impression that this is normal in humans, and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy. Do you not enjoy this / prefer this to being one-of-many?

From a different angle: If MBlume (or whoever your primary is at a given time) would be with you either way, monogamous or poly, which would you choose, given all the non-drama/non-jealousy & other apparent 'awesomeness' of your poly adjustment? Would you prefer to stay this way, or would you prefer an MBlume who was happy to give up all other men/women to be with just you forever?

Interesting. Thank you.

If someone's poly situation is so vulnerable [...]

Mainly I was concerned on behalf of Alicorn, because she just recently hacked herself into it, and also because she and MBlume had split up previously for whatever reason. That made it feel potentially more fragile than longer-established poly relationships, hence my comment.

You said what I tried to say, but better. Thank you.

You appear to be conflating non-monogamy with emotionally-shallow, superficial relationships undertaken primarily for sex.

I am in favor of a socially-connected human existence that involves an extended family/tribe of friends that one loves in different ways. What differentiates this from poly, other than sex?

I don't see very much of the two boyfriends who don't live in my house, so no. (They have other girlfriends to keep them occupied.)

We got married almost a year ago :D. I can't keep track of who-all spouse is dating (it fluctuates a lot) but I have three other nodes on the Big Unruly Chart Thing, one of whom is also dating spouse. Going very smoothly :)

poly community where women outnumber men and correspondingly have more partners than men

You've flipped something the wrong way.

My impression is that men are also influenced by how attractive other men think a woman is.

Status is zero sum? I highly doubt it. I am certain that it's not something you can simply wave at with an "as we know".

I know what you're talking about and I think it's a mistake. Specifically I think it's an exemplar of a larger category of cases where a marginalized group's adaptation to unfavorable circumstances is mistaken by culture (and by evo psych, which has an alarming tendency to make excuses such things) as being a fundamental facet of their nature.

You forgot to follow that with "...in a sexist culture with a very strong monogamy taboo and a tendency to punish women unequally for behavior considered slutty".

Something's wrong with those numbers. Medians of integer-valued quantities are always integers or half-integers.

EDIT: I've taken a look at the report, and it doesn't say anything about how they calculate medians, so I don't know how they're fudging their numbers to get these out.

EDIT 2: I should also say "good job for looking at the research and getting numbers", even if I'd like these researchers to be more transparent as to what they're actually reporting.

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Yet it described human behaviour accurately. People take significant risk of loosing decades of beta to get 5 minutes of alpha.

In fact... not even then, because you need that beta to help care for your offspring.

Remember there is no need for the beta taking care of the child to be the sperm donor. Also in tropical agricultural societies (like say West Africa) and in modern social democracies (like say Norway), women don't need the help of their sexual partners to care for their offspring.

I can only report from direct experience, and experience reported to me, that there certainly seems to be at least one geeky poly loose social web where this is said with a smile and a laugh... but is followed up with "you're welcome to contact them directly".

I have seen mostly-joking forms to do this in text, too. Yes, really. Again, while it's mostly not serious, there is a serious signal of "no skeletons in the closet".

I suspect this is more about a certain kind geeky attitudes and aptitudes than it is about poly. q.v. "geek flirt".

Oh, and I've also seen "references available on request" after an amicably resolved breakup. Again, within the sub-communities that have this geeky approach to sex and to relationships, it's a powerful signal.

(Enjoying the meta of posting this during a trip to the USA where I'm seeing LDRs, amicable exes and friends within these geeky sub-communities. There's a presentation in a tech conference in there somewhere too, but it's mostly about poly and friends-known-through-poly.)

Uncountable? Really? You have as many relationships as the cardinality of the real line? In that case you could end infinitely-many relationships and still have the same number left.

Snark aside, you're just redefining what a relationship is. My friend may not behave exactly the same in various contexts, but he's not a different person and it's not a different friendship. I don't have a thousand parents (or a thousand "parentships") just because my two parents interact with me in different contexts.

A much better point to make would be that people manage O(N^2) friendship relations without apparent difficulty. Yet it seems pretty clear to me that a romantic relationship requires much more effort (more "emotional resources" we might say) than all but the closest of friendships.

"doesn't it feel weird to be so easily repleaceable?"

If anything I would imagine someone in a well-integrated poly is /less/ replaceable than either half of a typical monogamous pair. In the latter case, when one spouse dies, the survivor may well be expected to mourn for a while, get over it, and find a new one to fulfil the same duties; in the former, everyone still has to deal with individual feelings of loss, and then the whole highly-optimized system has to be refactored according to new comparative advantages.

Ditto. (The relevant experience is secondhand, but played out essentially as you said in the other thread.)

The poly partner can agree to be monogamous, or the mono partner can agree to allow the poly partner to have multiple relationships. Either solution is fine if it works, but in practice one of the partners often isn't fully comfortable with the scheme. This can easily lead to stuff like a partner saying that thing X is okay but then changing his mind afterwards. Possibly worse, they may change their mind but not have the guts to say it (since they did, after all, already say it was okay) and get resentful and passive-aggressive. Or they may not really be comfortable with it in the first place, but go along with it because they don't want to destroy the relationship. Et cetera.

I'm not saying that this stuff is unavoidable: there do exist perfectly happy mono-poly pairs. But my experience suggests that such issues are pretty common for m-p pairs. (Not that my experience would be anywhere near a representative sample.)

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.

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.

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.

Somebody needs to produce bumper-stickers that read "What Would A Bisexual Immortal Superbeing Do?"

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.

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.

We were adorably earnest at 16. We also poked at our attitudes towards having children, and to materialism/wealth/possessions. I'm not recalling anything else that we discussed up-front like that. Maybe home ownership.

Results: we identified discrepancies in our desires for some of these things and flagged them as something to be extra careful in figuring out, and also identified some congruences which meant less conflict than expected, but we also flagged them explicitly as something to re-examine every five years.

We've been together 23 years and have toggled our position on one of the points; the others have (EDIT) not changed substantially.

Oh, well, yes. But not specifically about dating other people. And it is generally something I try to avoid where I can.

Hi. I apologize: this is a pretty long reply—but thanks very much for your comment. :) I really appreciate the opportunity to follow up like this on something I said a few years ago.

My thoughts on being poly. haven't changed. I still think it's the most functional romantic outlook. Although, after re-reading my comment: "without introducing new problems in their place" is somewhat of a loaded statement. If someone has a difficult time being polyamorous, then it introduces a lot of problems. Not to dwell on this too much, but that part of the comment was a bit circular: If a person is already poly., then, of course having a poly. relationship solves problems. Perhaps it would have been best to say "Since the society in which we're raised is largely monogamous, being poly. solves a lot of problems at the cost of having to exert more emotional effort against that norm."

... or something to that extent.

Three and a half years ago, I thought the likelihood of my entering a relationship in the first place to be very low. I didn't want to be in a relationship at all. This thought persisted up until the beginning of my relationship a little over a year ago (which was just a friendship at first, but ended up functionally being the same thing as a relationship—so we just went with it).

I wouldn't call our relationship polyamorous, but it's open. Pretty early on, we had a discussion that essentially came down to "You do what you want and I do what I want." That is, if I sleep with someone else, then it's ok—and if she sleeps with someone else, then it's ok. This is pretty limited to physical activity. I don't think either of us would be comfortable with "I have another girlfriend/boyfriend."

This actually did not take any hacking; it came very naturally to the both of us, and I am happy with it. In fact, I really like this relationship. When I talk about it, I feel like a grandfather showing off pictures of his grandchildren—in a "Look at this, look at this!" sense. I have to consciously stop myself from talking too much, haha. (Thinking about it a bit further, too, actively having multiple girlfriends might be more effort than I'd want to exert.)

We both expect this to be a long-term relationship, and think it most definitely has the potential to last a long time.

It read to me like Alicorn's title was commenting on the fact that many people perceive being poly as something you either are or aren't, and nobody could voluntarily switch and still be happy.

That's certainly true. But, again, IME being OK with not being the absolute top priority in one's partner's life 100% of the time helps one deal with all four of those not-quite-identical things.

I should also note that your first description made it sound like a temporary thing, whereas your second description makes it sound more like a change of the baseline; is that intentional, or am I just over-reading?

Their latest round of algorithm tweaks seems to have broken that. I now regularly match 95+% with people who are very insistent about only wanting single monogamous people.

This is excellent news!

That might or might not be the same kind of thing that my brain responds to. If it is:

It is easier to keep in mind a consistent Rule than to remember occurrently what justifies it and check for those conditions every time. If there is a really good reason to break a Rule, it will intrude itself upon your notice without explicit checking, so it's safe to just go around following Rules until and unless that happens. Assuming you had a good reason to implement a Rule, it's correspondingly bad to threaten its force (by ignoring it when it's inconvenient, for example - inconvenience-related exceptions could have been built into the original rule if they were really worth the extra checking and if they are genuinely well-defined), and you should be highly suspicious of yourself if you start coming up with great reasons to change your Rules whenever they get inconvenient.

It's none of someone's business why unless you choose to volunteer that information, and needing to know why you've just been turned down is a massive low-self-perceived-status signal.

Okay, seriously? This kind of "No you can't know what you did wrong, asking means you're even lower-status" dynamic to sexuality has probably been responsible for a number of geek/Aspie suicides over the last century. The existence and popularity of PUA isn't so much a response to men who feel deprived of sex, it's targeted at men who feel deprived of sex and romance and any idea of what they're doing wrong and any known strategy for even getting started on fixing things. A major reason why people hurt is that there's no known gentle slope into sex, and not getting any feedback is part of that.

I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before. (And my girlfriend has confirmed a number of these, so it's not just a unique nose.)

If you don't need to ask yourself, that's fine. If someone else does need to ask, try to be more sympathetic. And if someone asks you, TELL THEM.