mdcaton
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Right, that's the noise in these questions. Some things have changed since the paleolithic, so are we talking about conventions that fit with old social norms and economic systems, or something less plastic. I don't know that we know yet.
I was unclear on this point. As clarified above, I think you're probably right that 3 parents are better than two, for the kids. But ultimately, it's whether the arrangement is serving the parents' interests that will determine if kids are produced. The same person who loves being in long-term, child-free poly relationships might not want to be in a child-ful poly relationship, and in fact my intuition is that a lower proportion of people who are emotionally cut out for polyamory would eventually want kids. Need data.
Thanks for reading my (long) comment. RE the Laguna Pueblo, I will read up. Certainly it's not something that we've seen often. Whether this is because "things are different than they were before" or something else less plastic is another question.
To be clear, my argument about the correlation between polyamory and child-rearing is not about how effective a poly environment might be at child-rearing. On the contrary, I'd be that a stable poly family would provide access to consistent capital and caretakers that a mono family cannot. However, the question remains of how it's in the individual parents' interests to enter into a given family arrangement.... (read more)
I always counsel young males with still-healing injuries that will leave scars to think of good stories. As for females, most straight men I know are attracted to signs of toughness that don't otherwise confound the usual health-and-fertility signs (skin and hair), so scars might not always work. But anecdotes from LW commenters are not likely to be representative of the general conversation. Many women I know in SoCal that have impressive degrees from awesome schools hide their credentials for fear of scaring off men, and are surprise than I am surprised. That's still the world we live in.
Valuable post. Self-revelation is hard! I commend your account in this kind of forum. There are many considerations here, first and foremost of which is that emotional makeup a) differs greatly between people and b) is more set than we care to admit; i.e. not subject to hacking. If Alicorn's is to this degree, more power to her. Before the rest of my comment (as a mono): this is most emphatically NOT a moral judgment about polyamory. Consenting adults, will defend to the death your right, etc.
Other considerations (for someone like me, which maybe you are or are not):
I'm often on the defensive when polys
Although this is an old article I came to it from the Theory of Knowledge article (link below). I'm commenting because this crystallizes my objections to a repeated theme at LW: that irrationality comes from unquestioned cached thoughts, and that modern education systems exacerbate this tendency. In other words, I'm questioning whether password-guessing and memorization in education are actually avoidable, even at the highest levels of optimization, and whether this isn't in fact the result of the expansion of knowledge and the limits of human cognition.
I'm not even going to argue whether those are true statements and whether they are bad. But my own background has raised questions... (read 546 more words →)
Was hoping to make it to this one from San Diego but couldn't; can't wait for the next one. Anyone in San Diego who needs a ride next time, hold onto my email, mdcblogs@gmail.com.
A lot of the recent discussion of cryonics in the blogosphere is about others' basis for rejecting it. If you want it to become more available that's probably one of the steps to take. But grossly selfish? Or ghoulish, or an affront to nature, or any of those things? Much of medicine today would seem that way to someone living two centuries ago. For my part, I don't oppose it if others want to do it, and I applaud anyone who wants to use technology to improve their lives even if I think they're barking up the wrong tree; I don't plan to do it myself.... (read more)
Gah! I couldn't make meetings in the Bay Area, then I moved to SoCal. Finally a meeting in SoCal, and I'm away today. Is there a calendar?
Most of the discussions at LW about Friendly AI seem to concern defining clear moral rules to program into AIs, but there's another concern about the plausibility of enduring Friendly AI. It's not a stretch to assume AIs will be capable of some form of self-modification - if not to themselves, then to copies of themselves they make - and even if it's not their "intention" to do so, copying is never perfect, so some analogy to evolution will produce versions of AI that are longer-lived or faster-reproducing if they've mutated away their friendliness-constraints. In other words, it's very difficult to see how we can force the very structure of future AI by its nature to be dependent on being nice to humans - friendliness would seem to be at best an irrelevant property to the success of AIs, so eventually we'd expect non-friendly ones to appear. (Cancerous AIs?) And since this will be occurring post-Singularity, we will have little hope of anticipating or understanding such developments.