/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

>https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2016.1216153

>HLM regression models indicate that men who transition to a monogamous, or less competitive, mode of sexual behavior (fewer partners since last wave), reduce their risk for violence. The same results were not replicated for females.

That version of non-monogamy is pretty different from the standard polyamorous deal. It seems to be more about churn than about multiple simultaneous partners. The properties don't obviously transfer.

>jealousy

From what I've heard, that's a major thing that keeps some people away from polyamory. People who engage in it already have lower than typical sexual jealousy and are conscious of it.

>STI rates

This is orders of magnitude less of a problem than in the past, assuming everyone gets tested regularly. If this was an important reason not to do polyamory in the past then that makes polyamory correspondingly less problematic today.

Different societal conditions mean that different tradeoffs become viable. If theory predicts that something is irrational but people do it anyway, always consider that maybe it's the theory that's wrong.

And don't forget that there's no reason for evolution to align with morality, and that people are not fitness maximizers but adaptation executors. The most "evo-aware" thing to do wouldn't be to maximize sexual success but to become a sperm donor and stop caring.

Pretty much just:

>Two fifths of a gf is better than nogf.

>I live in the Bay Area, if I start insisting on monogamy people will think I'm secretly TradCath/NRx/watching Varg's videos.

>If I can't come up with a logical argument explaining why it's bad if my gf sleeps with other men then there's no reason for her not to sleep with other men. "It makes me feel bad" is not a good argument because I can just brainwash polyhack myself into no longer feeling bad about it. Knowing the evolutionary psychology derived reasons why jealousy exists just makes me more willing to be poly, since those reasons are not valid anymore, at least in my case. Claiming that it's bad/unwise/unworkable to go against the preferences set by thousands if not millions of years of evolution is to fall for the naturalistic fallacy.

>She's going to cheat anyway, at least like this I can maintain a little bit of dignity.

I think Scott is not in the at-risk group for male violence or STIs. Can you imagine him beating up someone? What STIs are transmitted through hugs?

>>14198

>2) being interesting, rich and good-looking, they should easily find attractive and faithful spouses. Many of them don't live in the Bay Area, and even in the Bay Area you can occasionally meet secular but sort-of-traditional women.

The third reason still applies to them. They also might have difficulty meeting or connecting with women who are not part of their social sphere, so polyamory is either preferable to a normie gf or just the path of least resistance. Scott, for example, likely has pretty high social status among rationalists and adjacents (perhaps also among other shrinks who've heard of his blog), with only "well, he's a doctor, that has to count for something" going for him outside of that group.

Also, just like with the free love thing back in the sixties, some men are just libertines so they don't mind open relationships if they are fairly successful at attracting women.

>>14199

They could always date introverted and kind STEM graduates - these girls meet the basic Less Wrong Compatibility Criteria without all the weirdness, ideological burden and rigged demographics.

Scott once mentioned getting along well with the aspie-poly-non-binary types. As he intends to take the risk of getting married, starting a family and homeschooling a child, it would be reasonable to take a break from the ingroup that didn't bring him desirable outcomes in last years and partially overlaps with social circles of his bullies, by default hostile towards socially awkward techbros. Scott has a strong, universally attractive selling point - he's a tall, white doctor. The other guys have different lucrative careers and more masculine facial features.

Polyamory indeed looks like a bad personal choice in their circumstances, and as an even worse recommendation to the broader public.

>>14199

>polyamory is either preferable to a normie gf

Silly them. They didn't learn from the late Heartiste that women are interchangeable.

>>14202

>the basic Less Wrong Compatibility Criteria

It would be helpful to explicitly name them.

>>14207

>Edit: for the Incels coming out of the woodwork: the reason you're alone is not because you're too ugly on the outside. It's because you're a shit human being and you need to invest that time and energy in bettering yourself if you want to have a more fulfilling life.

I mean, this person is not wrong. Most incels aren't alone simply because they are ugly. However, the same person would also hate (claim to hate) the lifestyle changes that could objectively compensate for ugliness.

> totally not about the female supremacy and treating men instrumentally

>>14210

Physical appearance, high status or ruthless dominance are necessary and sufficient to successfully attract women. Most incels (or rather unloved guys, as sex can be easily purchased) are alone because they lack two or three of these characteristics. Everything that falls under the personality umbrella is neither necessary nor sufficient; you may think about it as a nice addition in the already committed relationships, see:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5519305/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.2087

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9c55/a8cae3c8a5d238002a261fec643f767d1126.pdf

http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2087

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19558447

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2654465

SSC was already aware in 2014:

[I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 20% of average nineteen year old men. Compared with virgins, men with more sexual experience are likely to drink more alcohol, attend church less, and have a criminal history. A Dr. Beaver (nominative determinism again!) was able to predict number of sexual partners pretty well using a scale with such delightful items as “have you been in a gang”, “have you used a weapon in a fight”, et cetera. An analysis of the psychometric Big Five consistently find that high levels of disagreeableness predict high sexual success in both men and women.

If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess…"]

I wish I could paint a more humane picture, but denying the real state of things would be dishonest and even more harmful.

> Everything that falls under the personality umbrella is neither necessary nor sufficient

What do you mean? Physical apperance, status and dominance seem influenced by personality.

You need exercise to get fit but you need the right "personality" to endure or even better, enjoy it.

>>14212

I was suggesting that ugly and low-status men could stop being incels just by self-modifying to show dominance and lifting. I really, really doubt that the status of an already dominant man makes a big difference.

>>14215

Of course, that's a huge "just".

No amount of lifting will compensate for less attractive facial features or being short and ethnic (South or East Asian). If the guy from the HuffPost video wasn't so handsome and used valid evolutionary explanations instead of terms communicating adherence to the Blue circles (racial bias, microagressions), he would be instantly silenced as an entitled misogynist.

Most importantly, self-esteem is derived from positive social inputs and having options: you can't really fool your brain - especially if it leans towards being nice and introverted - if you didn't score well at the genetic and economic lottery of life. Especially if the dominant cultural narrative prioritizes women over men in relationships, and if men can be always shamed through the accusations of privilege and toxic masculinity.

It's not fooling if you understand the practical, real effects of self-esteem, kinda like one-boxing.

You have the option of having options.

>>14217

>No amount of lifting will compensate for less attractive facial features or being short and ethnic

Anecdotally it makes a difference even if it won't fully compensate for genetic handicaps in appearance. The main benefits are going to be psychological anyway.

>you can't really fool your brain - especially if it leans towards being nice and introverted - if you didn't score well at the genetic and economic lottery of life

The meta-level lesson of PUA is that you can fake it till you make it. At least some can. The 27% of men of >>14198 aren't so hopelessly unfit that a woman wouldn't willingly have sex with them even once in their lifetime. We are not at that level of dysgenics yet. The harm done to nice and introverted men by their culture is easy to underestimate when you are so focused on the genes. There is no way the same nice and introverted men brought up 100 years ago and dropped in our world in secret wouldn't do a whole lot better on the love front. Men who were unfortunately brought up in our time can reap some of the same benefits by means of changing themselves. You are only really hopeless if you can't or you won't actually change your mind. (Obviously none of this is a replacement for culturally enforced monogamy and I am not claiming it to be.)

>>14218

Maybe realizing this is the filter.

>>14210

The issue I take with this guy is that he 1) frames an obvious case of female privilege aka pussy pass as victimhood and 2) doesn't see the slightest bit of unfairness in the fact that a godawful offensive chick can get laid no problem, but "incels" need to "improve their personality" to achieve the same. He advises incels to do exactly what the experiment has shown to be unnecessary for the chick, and acts in a condescending manner as if he's proven his case twice over, even though in reality he has confirmed their assertions. It's blatant doublethink.

>>14221

What you are saying is right, but remember that on an imageboard "he is not wrong" shouldn't be taken literally.

>>14223

>Purple Pill

Don't think I've seen this one before. Do you just mean a mix of blue and red-pill perspectives?

>>14224

Blue Pill: male looks/status/dominance unimportant, internal locus of control (PC, denialist view)

Purple Pill: male looks/status/dominance somehow important, internal locus of control (socially acceptable view)

Red Pill: male looks/status/dominance very important, internal locus of control

Black Pill: male looks/status/dominance very important, external locus of control (Red Pill but fatalistic)

>>14225

Nice classification, but it misses that blackpillers emphasize looks a lot more than redpillers.

>>14242

> Very good talk, would recommend (and am recommending) to anybody interested in psychology and interpersonal relations, specially to fellow spergy types that need all the help they can get with regards to that latter subject.

Main takeaway: avoid relationships with people diminishing the role of invested fathers and deliberately practicing all sorts of subtle emotional manipulation in relationships, and because women are better at it than men, avoid relationship models with power dynamics extremely tilted in favor of women… oh wait.

>>14246

Oh no, not at all. In the contrary, she even says that a man who notices that a woman is successfully training them in such a manner should appreciate her because she has a valuable skill she could later use on other people for the benefit of the couple and their children, and on the children while raising them.

>>14250

What if I don't want to live among predators or to raise more efficient predators?

>>14250

Being an unconscious conditioner is very noticeable and unattractive in a woman as well as simply pathetic. I'd rather my wife be a sheeple and my children inherit autistic and moderate dark triad traits from me. Then they can consciously learn to condition people as they seek power and not do it by instinct like some animal.

When watching the video from >>14211 I got this one on the "Up next" sidebar. I think the part between 46:05 and 48:38 explains very clearly a certain attitude common among rationalists (specially the effective altruism types) that also leads to things such as acceptance of polyamory.

The whole talk is about the evolutionary origin of morality, but the main purpose of the talk is to support the idea that you could reason your way into a superior morality, one that is more logically sound and not as limited as the naturally evolved one. In the part I mentioned (46:05 to 48:38) she says that increased intelligence (from better nutrition, healthcare, whatever else causes the Flynn effect) leads to a broader morality that isn't focused only on the ingroup. But the effect of this Moral Flynn Effect is so far limited, and intelligence might not continue to increase, so people are still restricted to a great extent by the naturally evolved form of morality. So, we need to find the ideal, rationally determined morality that would arise after overcoming the primitive, evolved morality. She continues to say that evolutionary psychologists are stereotyped as wanting to maintain the status quo, of using evolutionary psychology to justify 1950s sex roles and the like, but that this is not true and that she's specifically interested in evo-psych because she seeks to surpass it.

That last bit is very obviously connected to the subject of this thread, but the previous part also helps explain the views of the people being discussed ITT. Much like Diana says one should not be restricted by the naturally evolved morality, but should seek to develop a better, more logical morality, the same principle would apply to other things, such as personal preferences. The same logic that leads some to spend 90% of their income on mosquito nets or to carefully weigh whether it's more important to give up beef or chicken (you know, since cows feel like more morally worthy animals, but it takes killing a whole lot of chickens to get as many meals as you can get from a single cow (Diana says save the chickens)) also leads people to determine that wanting exclusivity from their romantic partners is a backwards, no longer justified desire that must be overcome.

tl;dr: Spear the transhumanists, primitivism now.

>>14252

I don't think people who are good at training others as described in that video would necessarily be predators, they are just those who successfully convince others that their (the trainers') needs and wants are important. That said, I found it funny that she claimed women who are good at this should be preferred, since it presumes that their wants will be entirely or at least mostly aligned with the well-being of their husbands and children, which might not be the case. The predator types you mention being the most obvious example.

>>14253

>Being an unconscious conditioner is very noticeable and unattractive in a woman as well as simply pathetic.

Most people don't notice, and the whole conditioning others thing seems to work amazingly well for most women.

>I'd rather my wife be a sheeple

Sheeple do all this unconscious conditioning just fine though. It seems that self-awareness is what would limit it.

>my children inherit autistic and moderate dark triad traits from me. Then they can consciously learn to condition people

I hear autists are exceptional at manipulating people, or even at dealing with people in general. Good luck with your plan.

>>14253

Dumb, you should strive to system-one your system-two goals. The unconscious conditioners are probably better at it than you.

>>14253

IMHO it works differently. Unconscious manipulation involves things as playing with your hair (women) or taking power postures (men) in the presence of an attractive mate, some light teasing, ambiguity and escalation of interest. This can be a harmless and pleasant flirting game. Conscious attempts at conditioning people are, on the other hand, frequently toxic, exploitative, and praying on people's vulnerabilities.

It may be better to stay single forever rather than become a disposable piece of the predominantly polyandrous dual mating scheme.

>>14254

Rationalists or ea types are (being pushed?) into non-monogamy because, compared to the general population, they have/want less children and more instant gratification, have an over-representation of nerdy nice guys, and overlap with communities of strong progressive/kinky leanings. Current progressives frequently advocate for the gynocentric social order and bashing male agency for its own sake. Ironically, polyamory is further from the broader, rationally determined morality than (serial) monogamy, which should be considered a historically recent development limiting the harmful effects of irresponsibly following evolutionary instincts. I bet that monogamy, compared to non-monogamous alternatives, reduces more net suffering through the "fair" distribution of love, sex, agency and engagement, reducing violence, STD rates, and creating stable conditions for raising the next generations.

I would also mention a bunch of ridiculous poly dramas in LW circles, but these might be better kept in private… Anyway, don't end up like Jerry, rational dudes.

>>14262

>commenters on that video getting mad about the woman saying "well, it's sad that my husband feels lonely, but his feelings are not my responsibility"

>her boyfriend shows up and claims that to think otherwise would be a sign of codependency

People twisting definitions and rules-lawyering their way out of any blame drive me up the wall. Specially when the terms they misuse are psychology/psychiatry related.

>Actually, she would be mentally ill if she felt responsible for how her demanding to have an open relationship has had a very negative impact on her husband's well-being.

>>14446

>psychology study using self reported data

Why does anybody ever take this stuff seriously? I know it's difficult and at times unethical to get data in other ways, but this usually is like searching for your keys under a streetlight.

The only non-self reported data in that study was from asking the participants in the second study whether they would be willing to donate part of the $100 (leaf) they could potentially get from a draw. It doesn't say how many $100 prizes were given to the 524 participants in that experiment (the first study had three draws for 297 participants, the second one only mentions "a draw", possibly only one draw for the 524 participants?), but in any case the only actual, verified data in the whole study comes from "Would you be willing to give away a fraction of a prize that you are almost certainly not going to win anyway?"

>>14446

Worth noting that the author of the study in question adds the other result: it seems more attractive males cooperate significantly more in prisoner's dilemma. Appearance, I surmise, doesn't change conditional on cooperation. From this I gather that altruism in self-reports is proxy for abundance and successful, easy life guaranteed by good looks, hence perception of "cheapness" to help out another in a general case.

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1147186444500426752

>>14454

>abundance and successful, easy life guaranteed by good looks

Are you saying that good looks by themselves grant a heterosexual man a successful, easy life? This is implausible. What is much more likely is that good looks and success are caused by the same factors like low genetic load, good diet in early childhood, etc. Without these factors good looks are only a faked signal: useful, but not nearly as useful as what it is supposed to indicate.