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Well that’s not exactly watertight proof there, even though I already agree with the gist of what you’re saying. Where’s the pic from btw?
Considering the sex ratio within the rationalist community, it seems that part of their raison d’etre is to develop rationalizations why a polyandric relationship model isn’t that bad after all, and why droning around a few loose girls in the hopes that it might be YOUR dick getting wet the next time she goes on a coke binge is a viable mating strategy.
I would have passed all of this as something those silly Americans do that we’ll copy 20 years from now, except that I’ve seen traces of this among the more ‘edgy’ and ‘avant-garde’ tech geeks here in Finland as well. One of them told me he’s becoming a father, except that he’s not – he’s just in a relationship with a woman with a man who’s the father of the child. Among others, autogynephilia seems to be all the rage, I suspect partly as an innate perversion, partly as a coping mechanism.
Come on, that’s all I could get with my mad Google skillz. There’s lots of text proof if you go into their archives, which I won’t do. Pic I got from Patri Friedman’s blog. Some wedding of theirs.
I quit trolling on my 18th birthday but I had to say something at this self-congratulatory ritual of theirs. And yes, it’s a coping mechanism. Which they shouldn’t need to do if they didn’t try to become an endogamic cult. I get it, society sucks, nobody likes nerds, they call you names and don’t call you to their parties. You wanna make your own parties. Sure, we all like Exit. But Exit doesn’t mean you get to use your high IQ to make up a new morality to justify all the fucked up things you do to make do in your new community.
It reminds me of Greg Cochran’s story of the African tribe where boys get a parasite which makes their penises bleed. The whole tribe calls is male menstruation and its celebrated with a big ritual.
Jesus Christ, these Less Wrong people are irritating. Is there a charity I can donate to yet that will build Roko’s Basilisk?
hugo de garis is still flogging the artilect war.
Sounds like Nietzsche criticizing the origin of Christian ‘Slave Morality’ in Antichrist. Morality as coping mechanism.
The thread at Scott’s polyamory post is epically long – over 250 comments. The major recurrent ‘argument’ seems to be variations on ‘why should you care?’
I think I made a good point there, that implausible claims about human nature naturally bother me.
High IQ people can convince themselves of anything if sufficiently motivated.
I’d change that to sufficiently reinforced.
I wanted to escape into my world of fantasy too, but I didn’t have a world of like minded friends to reinforce my deviancy. Reality was always a close presence which I couldn’t ignore, irregardless to how fast my hamster run.
You’re right. People get id drift or fantasy drift without social-pressure as course correction. But if you can construct a social scene then you can reify the fantasy within the cult bubble. If your bubble grows big enough you take over normalcy.
Progressivism is sufficient social reinforcement to ignore reality for most people. It helps if you have a way of making hypocrisy / revealed preferences (self segregation into homogeneous neighborhoods) someone else’s fault.
And are proved unfit to govern, advisors at best in low concentrations of toxicity.
I just read that whole comment thread, and I have to say spandrell, you were doing God’s work there. I didn’t notice the hyper-rational overmen doing any “steelmanning” in that argument!
So the big guru Yudkowsky himself is “poly,” right? I don’t know which is more horrifying, that or the Basilisk. I don’t mean to say he’s ugly and the thought of him doing the deed with multiple women disgusts me, but rather that this extremely intelligent man, who has made more serious effort to be rational than almost anyone, ends up using his smarts to rationalize his big-man polygamy.
It was pretty surreal, I didn’t know things like that existed. The US is a really weird place. And I’m pretty well traveled! But yes, this rings more true every day:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Yudkowsky wouldn’t be ugly if he wasn’t that fat, and given his clout he could get a pretty hot and smart babe to marry and have babies with. But no, he’d rather run a swingers club and bang lots of fatties.
Patri Friedman got a hot redhead, had a baby with her and recently announced he’s out of the swinger thing. Of course the rest of the cult called him a self-interested asshole, but he made the right call.
SA linked to Friedman’s post saying he didn’t want to be a swinger anymore, and I don’t remember if it was in the original or the link thread (or both) that several commenters were pointing out that Friedman’s criticisms of the lifestyle sounded suspiciously like Enemy arguments against it, therefore they must be wrong.
The endless analysis of relationships and emotions and how everybody’s feeling seems to occupy quite a bit more of the practitioners’ time and energy than actual sex. I think this may actually be what the non-Big Men get out of such arrangements. Maybe that’s why Heinlein’s editor didn’t axe all the tedious poly-drama in Time Enough for Love–fanservice?
Yes that’s a good point. For all their super IQ and AI worship, instead of finding the cure for cancer they like to talk about Love and what would the AI do about Love and how to protect Love from the Robots. Sounds like one of those EST rituals.
You get fatties but you might also get someone like Julia Galef from time to time. Some would find that a good arrangement.
Though I would surmise that any 7s, 8s, 9s would disproportionately allocate time to sexual encounters with the tribal leader (i.e. Yudkowsky) and the good-looking males.
That’s the question I asked that everybody refused to answer. Who are the hot babes sleeping with? Is Julia Galef a swinger too?
There’s lots of text proof if you go into their archives, which I won’t do.
Well, I started skimming that link from your comment and was just about to return here and reply with something along the lines “Hell no. When you gaze too long into faggotry, faggotry gazes into you.” when I noticed this comment from one of their residents:
Gay pride parades are not meant to look appealing to the public. They are are a way of gloatingly intimidating the public to accept your self-rule. I say that as the greatest compliment.
Gotta appreciate the honesty, at least. This is no longer even tangentially related to your original post, but I find it encouraging that we’re starting to see the homo lobby show their true colors lately. “gloatingly intimidating the public to accept your self-rule” is a better distillation of the gay pride phenomenon that I as an impartial hater could ever come up with. We’ll see what happens in the near future as the American Manifest Destiny of the 21st century seems to mostly consist of making sure that there’s an annual pride parade happening in Moscow and Belgrade. In Soviet Russia, you haze faggotry.
Back to topic. Way back when LW/OC was readable, Yudkowski wrote an article where he drew an analogy on cults becoming more fanatic after events that contradict their worldview (only the true believers remain) and the formation of Bose-Einstein condensate where only gradually lower energy particles remain and eventually form a supercold condensate mass. While the model was aiming to describe the effect of large cognitive catastrophes on a collective mind, and how a core of ever more fanatical fanatics will remain afterwards, I think it applies to at least some ideological communities as well. The rationalists at least. What started as a forum for systematically-oriented atypical high-IQ people writing about our natural psychological misconceptions has become just another cult with their own peculiar ways and taboos (of which they are rightly proud of, just as they should expect themselves to be).
Years ago, someone wrote about the same thing happening to the PUA community. The normal ones who wanted to get a fulfilling relationship or a family – or even just a reliable girlfriend – had left and had no need to contribute any more, which left only the increasingly marginal sex addicts, harem builders and spergy approachbots remaining. Which further slanted the community focus towards their preferences. The longer you are with someone, the less applicability PUA stuff has. You don’t need to neglect replying to your wife when she texts you with an urgent issue at the middle of your work day just because you’ve sent the last 3 messages before that and you want to “avoid seeming too eager” or to “give the impression that you have plenty of interests besides her”. You don’t “dump the bitch” just because she has a nasty case of PMS this month.
That post is funny.
Heh. I wonder what happened with that. Also interesting how they got leftist entryists even in transhumanist newsgroups. I mean wtf.
Is your problem with polyamory is the polyandry part not the polygamy part? Polygamy is the natural and de facto system while mongamy is a nominal social constraint for social stability, so nothing to be deluded about.
Polygyny and polyandry where they exist are always exclusive, and reflect a balance of power or an old-age Malthusian law on who should have babies with whom.
This guys are running swingers club where both sides are encouraged to have multiple sexual partners at the same time. All in the name of not treating people as property and using rationality to overcome caveman jealousy blabla.
But yeah to the extent that the women aren’t sharing men to avoid too much population growth in the Himalayan valleys, the idea that women can be attracted to more than one man at the same time does require extraordinary evidence.
So if they don’t do the rationalization, and just say they are willing to handle a bit jealousy in exchange for sex and emotion variety and excitement, you won’t call them delusional?
Oh yeah I’m all for honest perverts.
Is this sarcastic?
Not really.
Some women can. Not that many really feel strong attraction to more than one man, but some percentage, maybe 10% or fewer, do. More than that number can successfully participate in polyandrous arrangements, because women don’t need to be that attracted to a man to open their legs for him if they’re getting something else out of the deal.
I read the entire comment thread on Polyamory. Hilarious stuff Spandrell. “Pics or STFU” is in fact a pretty damn good argument. However, I’m really glad nobody used it against Moldbug…
Moldbug is afaik a regular family man, and has never made any implausible claims about sex.
This is partly a test of some WordPress stuff, and partly a response.
Your response wasn’t that good, and you failed to respond to a fairly strong point made by some commenters: Humans are diverse. Some fraction of women (I’d estimate it at less than 10% of white, middle-class Americans) *are* psychologically able to maintain a strong attraction to more than one man. I suspect that the proportion increases among the more intelligent and more conscientious, because those are the ones more clearly able to examine the causes of their emotional reactions, and deal with them or change them, even without the mind-hacking tricks that the Rationalist Community loves so much.
The better argument (which you didn’t press very well, though asdf did somewhat) is that proselytizing for polyamory is harmful because most women can’t do it without psychological damage, and that harm is both to the community at large, and to the community of polyamorists, because of the number of people who will enter that community even though they’re not suitable for it who will spread their drama around in bad ways.
Another argument to make is that when there aren’t relatively strong legal and/or social strictures against general polygamy, one doesn’t get widespread polyamory, but widespread polygyny. Sure – I know a number of MFM triads and relationships, but I live in the Bay Area (in a subculture which tolerates polyamory pretty well, and has very little crossover with the LW community, even though EY lives 15 miles away). But I know that (having observed the BDSM community, and knowing Mormons) that the vast majority of polygamous relationships if polygamy becomes more accepted will be either polygynous, or a sort of ghetto-culture free-floating pool of hookups and transient pair bonds; both of which, in large numbers, are bad for society.
Any evidence on that? Besides the subculture you live in. Humans are surely diverse, you also get BSDMs and cuckold fetishes. But those aren’t normal. And that was the claim of the post, that it’s all just *so* normal and nice and warm.
The only real argument is that you don’t mess with monogamy. We’ve been doing it for millennia, for a reason. End of the story. If you prioritize your feeling good, next you end up calling your girlfriend “ze”. It’s a slippery slope if there ever was one.
He calls his girlfriend “ze” because his girlfriend is “trans”.