Thank you for the response. I discarded my point by point response, because I think I have a more elegant explanation: I parse your argument as saying that because there is and should be a high degree of uncertainty around the net harm/benefit of polyamory, we should avoid taking a position on it.
I think that is a fine position to have. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, because my parse of Keerthana Gopalakrishnan’s perspective is that she thinks polyamory is harmful and there is strong evidence for this.[1] And certainly critics of polyamory can point to a long anthropological tradition and a great number of studies, and advocates can note that those studies are for a wildly different context from modern international elites.
If polyamory is maybe slightly bad, then I think it’s reasonable for EA social consensus, let alone institutionalized EA, to favor letting people make their own choices. We don’t demand that every member eat an optimally healthy diet or practice gratitude journaling, in part because there are substantial differences between people and in part because people get to live their own lives.
If polyamory is very harmful and the evidence for this is very clear, and those harms can’t be pattern-matched exactly to an American gay man in 1970[2], then I would face a much more difficult set of questions. For some people polyamory seems to be intrinsic, and the bar for asking them to suppress that should be very high. I think that EAs should have a social consensus against relationships that we think are very likely to be harmful.
For example, many bright young people think that visa-motivated marriages are an obviously great idea. Having seen that obviously great idea crash and burn multiple times, with relatively few successes, and relatively causal explanations observed in the failures, I am now against it. I would advise a friend against it if they asked my opinion, and for a good friend perhaps even if they didn’t. And many EAs have EA friends.
I have recently seen someone try to claim that harms of polyamory are different because it’s not just social stigma: more people are affected because of multiple partners and STI risks are higher. Some people clearly don’t know queer history. Much of the “harms” of polyamory that critics raise in this piece seem to be exactly analogous to straight men being deeply offended at being propositioned by queer men.
Thank you for the response. I discarded my point by point response, because I think I have a more elegant explanation: I parse your argument as saying that because there is and should be a high degree of uncertainty around the net harm/benefit of polyamory, we should avoid taking a position on it.
I think that is a fine position to have. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, because my parse of Keerthana Gopalakrishnan’s perspective is that she thinks polyamory is harmful and there is strong evidence for this.[1] And certainly critics of polyamory can point to a long anthropological tradition and a great number of studies, and advocates can note that those studies are for a wildly different context from modern international elites.
If polyamory is maybe slightly bad, then I think it’s reasonable for EA social consensus, let alone institutionalized EA, to favor letting people make their own choices. We don’t demand that every member eat an optimally healthy diet or practice gratitude journaling, in part because there are substantial differences between people and in part because people get to live their own lives.
If polyamory is very harmful and the evidence for this is very clear, and those harms can’t be pattern-matched exactly to an American gay man in 1970[2], then I would face a much more difficult set of questions. For some people polyamory seems to be intrinsic, and the bar for asking them to suppress that should be very high. I think that EAs should have a social consensus against relationships that we think are very likely to be harmful.
For example, many bright young people think that visa-motivated marriages are an obviously great idea. Having seen that obviously great idea crash and burn multiple times, with relatively few successes, and relatively causal explanations observed in the failures, I am now against it. I would advise a friend against it if they asked my opinion, and for a good friend perhaps even if they didn’t. And many EAs have EA friends.
That point is not made explicitly, but it is hard to parse her as having any other stance based on her writing and the tone of the Time piece.
I have recently seen someone try to claim that harms of polyamory are different because it’s not just social stigma: more people are affected because of multiple partners and STI risks are higher. Some people clearly don’t know queer history. Much of the “harms” of polyamory that critics raise in this piece seem to be exactly analogous to straight men being deeply offended at being propositioned by queer men.