my reading on this is EA/rationality has quite a few people who are very well informed and thoughful and like to geek out about this stuff, although culturally not quite the same as you and also more than a few people (and I say this while still saying I have much respect for the guy) who should read something on this topic by someone not named Scott Alexander
i think "please do not intefere with people's dating decisions unless there is a very very good reason" is the hard-won-of-experience cultural practice here
hrmm I think the awkward thing here is 'socially awkwards around romance and inclined to listen to you' is going to correlate pretty well to 'single , insecure +not terribly sexually experienced' which is going to correlate with 'will and maybe should be seeking out a serious relationship anyway' so I think Owen here is kind of the unusual case as someone in this demographic 'sleeping around'
or something
and I can see lots of ways increasing the ambient level of sex-negativity is going to make these people worse/more socially awkward about approaching people
also for poly guys starting out being a secondary partner seems like a good way to get some experience without being too subject to the gender ratio problem
I think the issue with "consider" is that like, I suspect most of the people who should be considering this will not and I'd rather give more actionable/precise advice than this for people who are like, struggling with scrupulosity or whatever.
also the issue that people saying "hey that sexually nonnormative thing you're doing consider not doing that" a lot does create a hostile environment
tbh I always feel slightly like I want to push back when people say "polyamory is this thing that's new and untested and that our culture does not have well established guidelines for"
like, poly feels pretty intuitive to me from being somewhat immersed in poly culture, it's just that I don't think the norms have seeped out into the mainstream yet? Sure, the way people do poly is pretty heterogeneous but the same is true of monogamy?
I think I do want to urge people to be cautious if they don't feel entirely comfortable with it/ don't feel like they get the norms, or it feels like they're trying to work it out from first principles. But 'this seems as simple as any other relationship structure' is a state that it's possible to get to
differences in sex drive are about as large as gendered differences get, I think. i suspect that the difference in comfort is less that women have better social skills[1] than that they have the moral luck that the median man is happy to sleep with the median woman and that they are ~less physically threatening or something. (add 'on average" to all of the above)
i suspect differences in ~romantic attraction are much smaller, it's just that secondary relationships ... are romantic relationships? idk about all the stuff monogamous people do.
I mean this proposal is a conjuction of a lot of recommendations some of which seem reasonable some of which seem unreasonable to me, so I abstained ?(despite being against discouraging casual relationships more broadly)
i mean
this is the point of flirting? it is plausibly deniable?
i think a lot of the time flirting means, say "i'm not sure if i'm ~attracted to you and testing the waters would help me get data on this"
(i think poor social skills often cashes out as "not having things like this as hypotheses" rather than "being unable to read people")
im honestly not sure if there's a clear line between flirting and non-flirting.
if i knew i wanted to hook up with someone i would simply tell them
my reading on this is EA/rationality has quite a few people who are very well informed and thoughful and like to geek out about this stuff, although culturally not quite the same as you and also more than a few people (and I say this while still saying I have much respect for the guy) who should read something on this topic by someone not named Scott Alexander
i think "please do not intefere with people's dating decisions unless there is a very very good reason" is the hard-won-of-experience cultural practice here
I had an implicit 'psychological' in my head when i said 'sex differences', thanks for pointing that out :)
hrmm
I think the awkward thing here is 'socially awkwards around romance and inclined to listen to you' is going to correlate pretty well to 'single , insecure +not terribly sexually experienced' which is going to correlate with 'will and maybe should be seeking out a serious relationship anyway'
so I think Owen here is kind of the unusual case as someone in this demographic 'sleeping around'
or something
and I can see lots of ways increasing the ambient level of sex-negativity is going to make these people worse/more socially awkward about approaching people
also for poly guys starting out being a secondary partner seems like a good way to get some experience without being too subject to the gender ratio problem
I think the issue with "consider" is that like, I suspect most of the people who should be considering this will not
and I'd rather give more actionable/precise advice than this for people who are like, struggling with scrupulosity or whatever.
also the issue that people saying "hey that sexually nonnormative thing you're doing consider not doing that" a lot does create a hostile environment
tbh I always feel slightly like I want to push back when people say "polyamory is this thing that's new and untested and that our culture does not have well established guidelines for"
like, poly feels pretty intuitive to me from being somewhat immersed in poly culture, it's just that I don't think the norms have seeped out into the mainstream yet? Sure, the way people do poly is pretty heterogeneous but the same is true of monogamy?
I think I do want to urge people to be cautious if they don't feel entirely comfortable with it/ don't feel like they get the norms, or it feels like they're trying to work it out from first principles. But 'this seems as simple as any other relationship structure' is a state that it's possible to get to
idk man I feel like I'm pushing back on this from something close to a mainstream sex-positive feminist viewpoint? the left is not homogeneous?
differences in sex drive are about as large as gendered differences get, I think.
i suspect that the difference in comfort is less that women have better social skills[1] than that they have the moral luck that the median man is happy to sleep with the median woman and that they are ~less physically threatening or something.
(add 'on average" to all of the above)
i suspect differences in ~romantic attraction are much smaller, it's just that secondary relationships ... are romantic relationships? idk about all the stuff monogamous people do.
I think the human social skill default is we assume other people are like ourselves
I mean this proposal is a conjuction of a lot of recommendations some of which seem reasonable some of which seem unreasonable to me, so I abstained ?(despite being against discouraging casual relationships more broadly)