There is a certain school of thought that opposes monogamy on the basis that it restricts the amount of love, intimacy, and sex one can have. It considers love, intimacy, and sex terribly important and wishes to maximise them. In answer to that idea, I present this dialog:

Adam: Monogamy is restrictive.
Jane: So is everything.
Adam: Well what's the point of monogamy? Why is it a good restriction?
Jane: You've missed the point; if everything is restrictive in some way, we needn't defend against that charge by giving reasons something is worth the cost. Everything has that cost. Further, you act as if monogamy has something to prove. But it is conventional, and deviations from convention take effort. In this case, great effort. We should be monogamous unless you can show it to be such a loathsome way of life that we recoil from it, and prefer great hardships.
Adam: Monogamy limits my sex life; that's bad.
Jane: Why do you think sex important?
Adam: It is an expression of love and intimacy.
Jane: Monogamy/romance is a tradition that offers love and intimacy. It is their only known source. They are not creatures of reason, gained through argument. The specific criteria for feeling them has never been discovered. How do you hope them to remain when you scorn their brothers and sisters?
Adam: Maybe we can take part of the monogamy tradition and leave the rest.
Jane: That is a delicate matter. Maybe we can make some small changes. What specifically do you suggest?
Adam: I want to have the good and fun parts, like love and intimacy and good sex, and leave out the parts that limit how much of these I get.
Jane: Do you deny the limiting parts are an integral part of the tradition?
Adam: What do you mean?
Jane: The causal roles are unclear but we can see some surface relationships. For example, exclusivity is thought to make people feel more special and intimate.
Adam: You're suggesting the various aspects of the tradition are related in complex ways and I cannot expect them to continue to function in isolation?
Jane: That's right.
Adam: Could I devise a life support system so they continue to work?
Jane: Perhaps. But I imagine the first step to be creating explanations for how the parts you want to rid yourself of are related to the parts you want to keep. This will help you see whether your course is wise, and also see what sort of replacements are needed to retain functionality.
Adam: I'll get back to you.
Jane: Before you go, let me express my skepticism in the notion that half of the monogamy tradition is very good, and half is very bad, and that the proper course is to get more of one part by removing another part.
Adam: What do you think of love and intimacy?
Jane: I am skeptical of their rationality. This is not to say that I oppose them. But I don't see anything to be gained by seeking out as much of them as possible. Our traditions cause us to desire them to some extent, and also provide for that desire to be fulfilled. What's wrong with leaving that alone?
Adam: I'm not convinced the traditions say that, exactly. Why do you think I'm so interested in lots of sex and love?
Jane: There are many voices today, including hedonists and religious conservatives. Both make mistakes, and we needn't follow any voice exactly in order to be generally in the mold of convention. I think my interpretation is true enough to the tradition for its followers to draw on our cultural knowledge, and that my position would be considered reasonable by most. In fact, I think it would have a larger appeal than the hedonist position, because it is moderate and will not alienate any major factions.

I have been trying to imagine how rational, hangup-free people with no knowledge of our culture would deal with our sexual customs if they suddenly lived with us. Here is the result:

First, the rational people don't realise anyone cares about sex. After some public incidents which embarrass all the involved today-people, they figure out that something strange is going on, though they have no idea what and don't understand embarrassment. Next, they are too distracted by burning curiosity to have any sex, and ask incessant questions about the customs regarding sex. Then they decide to try out the customs.

Nirit asks his friend Keatac to marry him. They have a ceremony with some authentic lines from romance movies. They treat it like acting and try to stay in character, but no one understands their character's motivations very well. The part about the audience sitting and watching silently is especially odd: it seems boring and pointless. They decide not to bother with that part, and the most members of the audience spend the wedding in conversations with their neighbors. The happy couple get a hotel room and lock the door to keep all their other friends out, then dutifully wait for nightfall. At sunset, they finally have sex. They gather they are supposed to stay with the same person for a long time, and be exclusive, so they try to.

Previously, Nirit had frequent sex with his friends Keatac and Syl. Nirit fends off questions from a slightly annoyed Syl. Syl asks why Nirit chose Keatac, and Nirit tries to act in character by saying Keatac has pretty eyes. Syl watches some episodes of Friends, then lifts weights for twenty minutes and propositions Nirit again, saying they should have an affair now. Nirit doesn't understand much, but he's convinced that's against the customs no matter what Friends depicted, so he finds some Christian websites to back him up. Syl then starts asking about the purpose of the customs, and Nirit replies that he isn't sure but wants to try them. Syl gets bored with the argument but is quickly distracted by a new hobby: paintball.

Eventually, Nirit misses sex with Syl and researches what he must do to have it. He discovers breakups, and (mimicking a TV character) tells Keatac that it's over. Keatac asks for some time to look up the proper reply. The next day, Keatac says he's ready, then shouts that he hates Nirit and exits the room by stomping his feet loudly and slamming the door. Nirit claps happily; he hadn't thought to try to damage a door for no reason, but recognises good acting when he sees it.

This begins an epidemic of breakups. None of the people broken up with mind. During the entire experiment, no one lies, and they only cheat out of ignorance or to try it out. There are few breakups by phone, despite the convenience, because they try the monogamy custom seriously and realise that it is dishonorable to breakup without meeting the person face to face.

Before long, people make a habit of breaking up immediately after sex, so if they run into someone else and want to have sex, they won't have to find their last partner to breakup. Getting together is just a matter of saying they want to, and unlimited breakups with the same person are allowed, so they find this makes sense. It takes Nirit a while to figure out how monogamy actually manages to exclude any sex: at first he thinks that surely the people of today, who've had this system for millennia, must have already figured out to breakup after every sexual encounter. When Nirit tries to explain the insight to a person of today, the person comments sarcastically that college kids already figured that out. Nirit doesn't understand sarcasm, but isn't surprised that young people are ahead of the game.

Some children are *impossible*. Some parents fight with their own children. Some girls are stunningly hot. Some guys are no less attractive, even if less effort has gone into describing it. Some people have midlife crises -- all of a sudden -- when the problem was visible for many years. Others waste their lives on trivialities and never notice. Some people go to great lengths to please others and be socially acceptable. Those same people exert effort to hurt anyone who doesn't do likewise.

These seemingly disparate situations all have a common thread. I now wish to introduce a matter of some consequence. First we will consider the effects, and afterwards I will explain how it happens. So bear with me if at first some notions strain your credulity.

Imagine that all the sins and vices of humanity are not natural, innate, inherent, God-given, or genetic. Consider that they are ideas, passed on through the generations, just like the knowledge to build fire or speak a language. This is not a very popular proposition, because it plants responsibility for the failures of humanity squarely on people and their mistakes. But that is no reason to think it untrue, and it is deeply optimistic because it insists that we are not stuck with our problems forever.

For an idea that isn't naturally reoccurring to survive very long, it must be able to get from older people to younger people. The best known and most effective means of transferring knowledge to the next generation has always been the teachings of a parent to his child. It is rare that any source rivals the influence with a child that his parents have, especially for very young children whose minds are most malleable. So if we consider that sins are ideas, and we further suppose that children do not invent all their sins anew, the most likely source of vice is from their parents.

It may seem a strange concept that parents would teach vices to their most loved ones, who they would do anything to protect. Surely no parent wants to hurt his child, or worse, doom him to a life struggling against vice and immorality. But what happens is not always what is intended to happen. It is well know that everyone has flaws, and that must include parents, no matter how virtuous their desires. Why should not their flaws make them do wrong unto their children?

Here I will ask you to again imagine a fact that seems foreign to the reality you know. We normally think of flaws in simple terms. A person might be a poor judge of romantic partners, or investment opportunities, or quality appliances. A person might have an angry streak and hurt his loved ones, or a cruel streak and hurt acquaintances, or be gullible or miserly or stupid. But where do such characteristics come from, if they are not inherent traits of humanity? They are not well liked like math, and no parent gives lessons to teach his child to be angry. So imagine that a part of the flaw was that the person behaved in such a way that he *did* teach the flaw to his children. Consider what reality would be like if this were true:

The shortcomings of humanity are now comprehensible, explicable phenomena, and we can do something about them. If defects in children are the result of parental behavior, then they can be prevented if parents behave differently. If our neighbors deficiencies are just ideas, we can reason with them. Most importantly, those parts of our own character that we find most distasteful are not outside our power to change. This view, while superficially it seems to cruelly blame people for qualities they'd do anything to give up, in actuality is a message of hope and optimism that we can all change for the better.

To see how it may be plausible that what you have imagined is accurate, let us turn our attention now to a concept that is already well accepted: the meme. A meme is an idea that, in the right circumstances, causes behavior in people so that the meme is copied into other people's minds essentially intact. Earlier we imagined flaws that caused themselves to be copied into the minds of children. If flaws are ideas, memes are a good fit.

Memes function according to the principle of evolution. Evolution simultaneously accounts for how the complexity of memes came to exist and gives us logic to see what sort of memes would come to exist. Complexity comes from competition over many generations. Over time, changes that make a meme more competitive will be favored. It is an easy proposition that improvements that help memes spread effectively would increase complexity. Think of a serious, involved debate like over abortion. Both sides have complex positions, and if you removed most of the complexity from either side it would become unconvincing.

What do memes compete over? Being passed on to younger people. Only a limited (large, but limited) amount of information is passed on. The logic of memes says that only the most competitive ones will survive, so we should expect all memes to have some characteristics to ensure they are passed on to more and more (younger) people (or to be new and on their way out).

How do memes compete? What makes a good one that will survive? It takes knowledge. This can either be knowledge of how to survive directly, or it can be knowledge of reality that people find valuable. This suggests (following David Deutsch) two distinct categories of memes: static and dynamic. The names will make sense shortly. Static memes embody knowledge of how to survive: they have knowledge of how to cause people to spread them. They contain mechanisms to cause human behavior, and function in any environment where people don't know how to resist those mechanisms. Dynamic memes have knowledge about reality, like an explanation of how to fix cars, or a theory of gravity. They function in any environment with people who value good ideas and actively seek them out.

Static and dynamic memes have different methods of ensuring continued survival, and that's where their names come from. Static memes, in essence, work to create a world of stasis. If nothing changes, they live forever. Dynamic memes are so named because they always change. They survive only as long as they remain the best ideas we have, but they are only replaced by better ideas, so the tradition of dynamic memes lives on.

Static memes might sound like a dark fantasy. Ideas that control people and suppress creative thought? However, their logic can and would work if the right ideas existed. So the only issue of their reality is in whether they were ever invented. Designing an idea capable of controlling human behavior and suppressing creativity would be virtually impossible. No one has the necessary knowledge and understanding of human behavior. However, static memes could have begun extremely ineffectively, and evolved to become more effective. At first, one might control human behavior in only a few rare cases, and only be able to suppress a few specific sorts of thoughts. But new variants that were a little more powerful -- that controlled people a little better -- would be selected for. Other qualities that would be selected for include being harder to notice having the meme, being harder (more complex or more painful) to get rid of the meme, and being better at causing people to copy the meme to children.

Returning to our initial queries, the common theme is that static memes offer an explanation of each situation. The child is impossible because his parents are hurting him which makes him irrational which makes him more accepting of static memes that don't make sense. People being attractive makes not enacting the romantic ritual painful and makes choosing mates an irrational process thus ensuring less competent parenting. People waste their lives because they are living statically. And social norms are a method by which static memes suppress new ideas.

School is thought to be a wonderful place, a veritable paradise for those of pure heart. Any child who truly wants to learn will find himself presented with eminently valuable opportunities. The children who do not thrive are losers who rebel against learning and thought. The virtuous children may suffer some at the hands of bullies, but it is a small price to pay for the growth available.

Childhood is thought to be a whirlwind of fun, personal development, and curiosity. Children have so many great activities to participate in, so many chances to bloom and build character, so much help and guidance, and such rich lives. And they have plenty of time to relax and enjoy it because they don't have to work and are free of responsibilities and burdens. It is a great blessing, and life is never the same again after work begins, and especially not after having children. Sometimes lazy children are tempted by sins like excessive television or marathon video game sessions, but as long as their parents do their duty, there is no danger. Being negligent would be a great disservice to those children.

Teachers are thought to be saints, famous for inspiring the best in children. They are kind and motivated. A few are lazy, and that is unfortunate and regrettable, but on balance unimportant. Teachers offer personal advice and help as appropriate, and always have something interesting or important to teach. Any child who has faith and puts his life in their hands will be well served and, when he enters adulthood on his own, will be well prepared to flourish.

The Bible teaches us that to spare the rod is to spoil the child, and promises that everyone will live happily ever after once vice is beaten out of children. Even the non-religious among us see that that is exactly right. Schools never discipline children of good character. But to leave a lazy, uncurious child to his own devices would be utterly irresponsible.

Parents take the Bible's teachings to heart, too. They love their children, and try to help them as much as they can in good conscience. But when their children refuse to listen to reason and persist in immoral actions, they must, for their own good, be saved from themselves and disciplined. Today parents have found new and more humane ways of disciplining children that don't even really hurt, like time outs and letting babies cry themselves to sleep and natural consequences.

The general model is the parent helping the child see the truths (including moral truths) that the parent knows. It is thought that the parent knows best, and that parents should take appropriate steps to make sure child understands. The parent should be as nice as humanly possible, but failing to impart critical moral knowledge, by any means necessary, would be gross negligence. No where does this formula give attention to the possibility of parental error. It is thus a recipe for entrenching mistakes forever.

Feeling bad has two distinct meanings. The first meaning we will call "coercion" and the second "inner conflict". Coercion is bad, inner conflict is good. Coercion is when you are hurt, when everything goes wrong. Inner conflict is when you wrestle with moral dilemmas and hard problems. Having conflicting theories is the same as having problems, and problems are not bad. The growth of knowledge can be seen as progress from problems to new and better problems; that's just as accurate a description as progress from solutions to more solutions. Hard problems have two different meanings. Hard problems can be problems that hurt, or just problems that are not simple, take a while to solve, matter, you might never solve. Problems hurt when you are unable to think about them in a rational way that makes progress. This feels frustrating. Not solving a problem does not inherently cause frustration. Having good problems to think about is fun; life would be boring without them. What's bad is when it hurts. We shouldn't shy away from problems for fear of being hurt. Being scared of problems is one of the mechanisms that makes them hurt.

Normally we engage in an intricate process of scheduling our thoughts, and choices, and problems, and criticism, and creativity. We constantly find short term solutions and juggle a variety of pressing issues. This is a good and necessary part of life. Coercion is when we drop the juggling pins and they fall on our head and give us brain damage. Inner conflict is just when there are a lot of pins that stay in the air a long time. There's nothing virtuous or admirable about coercion. But there is no mechanical way to avoid it. Coercion is not predictable and only happens as a result of failures of creativity. It only seems predictable when someone actively tries to hurt us, and has evolved traditions aiding them in hurting us. But in our own intellectual life, as long as we have some sense of what areas we are extraordinarily irrational about, there is little to fear. That doesn't mean coercion won't happen, it just means there is no specific thing to avoid that will help. Coercion is not caused by struggling with the conflicting theories that TV is worthwhile and a waste of time. It's caused by being unable to decide, for no good reason, whether to, as a temporary measure, watch TV today, or not. Coercion is not caused by being told that you should not hit your sister. That's just a good idea. It's caused by your parent trying to stop you from doing something you think is important to do, and you being unable to see why, and your parent not being helpful or comforting, and you believing your parent won't explain to your satisfaction later, and you being unable to see how to not mind, and you being unable to decide to think about it later in 5 seconds or 30 seconds or 5 minutes or 30 minutes or a day or a week, and you not being able to distract yourself and the issue is painful. Coercion is disasters of scheduling where problem solving goes awry and you hurt yourself. Avoiding problems does not help avoid coercion at all. It helps avoid learning. Not learning causes coercion, because it's harder to be happy when you have a bad life.

Not knowing the answer, all by itself, is not scary. Wondering what is right to do, and feeling conflicted, should not be scary. Do your best, and do it in such a way that if you're wrong you'll learn better. What more could anyone ask of you? And do one thing at a time, if that helps. Delay delay delay deciding while you do other things. Few problems need to be solved at the first moment they are thought of. Do them when it's best to. Be optimistic. You can and will make progress. There's nothing to fear. Just keep trying and you will, at the least, learn about what doesn't work. There is no reason this should hurt.

Parents should not be particularly scared of accidentally coercing their children. Innocent mistakes are as likely to cause coercion as random bad luck. That is to say, they will never cause coercion if people are rational about the subject in question. What parents should avoid is intentionally doing things designed to thwart, hurt, or oppose their children. This especially means all forms of disciplining children. If children do bad things, take their side and help them learn better. Anything that is truly good they will want for themselves. True morality doesn't hurt us, it helps us. It is not criticism, or being contradicted, that hurts anyone, so don't fear to do those. Instead focus on solving chronic problems and avoiding acting irrationally without thinking.

Finding positive interpretations is a critical part of being optimistic. In our relationships with friends and family, positive interpretations are nearly always true because the people close to us don't want to do bad things to us, or at all. Misunderstandings and miscommunication are common occurrences, so it's wise not to jump to negative conclusions just because something seems bad.

Positive interpretations can be self-fulfilling prophecies, just as negative interpretations can be. Suppose someone asks a question, and he could mean a stupid question, or an interesting one. If we answer the interesting one, it may lead him to be interested in that and see the issue in the proper way, even if he didn't already. And we will be saying something more interesting and therefore better. Assuming the person means the stupid question, or even asking if he does, shows we think he is or may be stupid, and encourages him to see himself that way.

Positive interpretations help make life safer. For example, a child in need of advice, and partially confused about a moral issue, will want to be able to ask his parent questions and make mistakes about that issue without his parent deciding he is wicked. Rather, the parent should stick to the positive interpretation that the child is learning, and is not bad, and will be fine, and wants to be good. And most of the things the child says that seem bad won't be. Some will be glossing over an issue while focussing on a different one. Some will be harmless confusion about an unrelated topic. Some the child will be right about. Some, while the content is bad, won't indicate any defect in the child himself who's just curious about a bad thing.

Another issue is that being wrong about positive interpretations is less costly than being wrong about negative interpretations. That is why criminals only go to jail if there is no reasonable doubt: if there is any reasonable positive interpretation of events in which the man is not guilty, the risk of making a tragic mistake is too high. Similarly, to treat someone too well is nothing to be ashamed of, and no great harm will come of it. But to treat someone, especially your friend or child, too badly is a mistake you will regret.

A binary choice is a choice with two options. Most binary choices aren't. For example "boxers or briefs?" is presented as having two options, but in fact there are others, such as going commando or wearing long underwear.

There are a lot of binary choices out there, like disciplining your children or spoiling them. Being permissive or harsh. Being left or right wing. Believing certainty, or that we don't know anything. Believing in God, or not. A child sharing his toy, or being selfish. A mother making her child share, or permitting him to act badly.

Each of the above examples isn't really a binary choice. There are all sorts of alternative options. For example one can be neither permissive and negligent, nor harsh in a variety of ways. One way would be to be helpful. This avoids "letting" kids do whatever bad things they want by helping them find out what is good to do. It also avoids being harsh by helping the child to get things he wants instead of thwarting him.

Common preference finding and non-coercion don't function in a world of binary choices. They involve creating new choices just as much as finding ways to like things other than our initial preference. Frequently, none of our initial solutions are good enough, and we need to think of new options.

If your child doesn't like something, do not tell him these are the possibilities, and that's the way it is, and he can have whichever color toy he wants as long as it's red or black. Buy some pink paint. If he doesn't like the options that seem to be available, it's time to brainstorm. Be optimistic.

Blogs are slamming Google for cooperating with China.

I am saddened and dismayed to see anti-capitalist and anti-corporate rhetoric, especially from right-of-center blogs. Making a mistake is one thing; maybe Google did. But assuming the cause must be the profit motive is anti-capitalist. There are many ways to make a mistake that are not about greed.

I have not seen, in a single post, any actual evidence that Google is doing this out of greed. No arguments explaining why the profit motive causes mistakes. No quotes from Google executives advocating greed. No calculations about how much money Google will make by this decision, and whether that is enough to cause corruption. No discussion of whether this is profitable at all (generating negative publicity is bad for business). No explanations of why people with good ideals would turn to evil beyond assertions that money is a force for evil. The big fuss is, I have to say, nothing but unreflective calumny that one would normally expect only from very silly lefties.

I don't know if Google's cooperation is a mistake or not. I (and other bloggers) do not have the necessary inside information to accurately judge just what options Google had and exactly why it chose this. Guessing that Google is a sinful capitalist company may be fun, but it doesn't tell us why this happened or whether it was the right decision.

There are dual sins at work here. First we have the debate tactic of saying the people we disagree with have immoral motives (while failing to acknowledge their actual position). Second, we have the profit motive as the evil motive of choice.

Here is an example of an unfair headline:

Don't Be Evil - Unless It's Profitable
The Conservative Voice

The right wing anti-capitalist pieces don't seriously argue their position. What could they say? That US corporations are greedy and corrupt and if only we weren't capitalist we could live in freedom, with no censorship?

This piece calls Google evil, and suggests that caring about business may entice Google more deeply into evil. It suggests Google plans to notify users when search results are blocked, but it asserts that is only worth brownie points and makes Google a little less evil. It goes on to say:

They say that they will have a link somewhere on the Google.cn page enabling users to access the U.S.-hosted version at: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=zh-CN. So that Chinese users who prefer can opt for the pre-Google.cn experience.

but doesn't believe this to absolve Google of evil because it might not be displayed prominently enough. Evil is the premise, not the conclusion.

Here is Google's explanation of its decision.

Edit: "Very silly lefties" links to the Democratic Underground. If you don't believe in conspiracy theories, that doesn't apply to you.

This is an interesting example of a site that is against people having power and control over what they do.

Mixed into a couple reasonable arguments, it mostly opposes the "nofollow" feature on links (which makes search engines not count them) because it lets people control who they give link credit to, so now they can sell it, or not give credit to sites they don't like.

The anti-nofollow people act like nofollow is dangerous. But no one has to use it. They are really against anyone who wants to use nofollow having the option to. In other words, they want to control people they disagree with. They advocate the world being such a way no one can do anything but enact their theory of how to live.

Usually anti-human-power views are associated with, say, gun control advocates or people who hate technology. But I think it's very widespread. Any sort of authoritarian view that does not want to allow people to make their own choices is anti-human.

Paul Graham wrote:

Imagine if people in 1700 saw their lives the way we'd see them. It would have been unbearable. This denial is such a powerful force that, even when presented with possible solutions, people often prefer to believe they wouldn't work.

This is a very nice way to explain the issue, so I shall elaborate. People have, since the dawn of humanity, opposed new ideas that would reveal their lives as flawed and lacking and even miserable. This leaves two viewpoints we can take about the present: we are at the end of human progress and our lives have no serious flaws, or it is like 1700 and we are in denial about many problems.

Believing we are the best the Earth will ever offer goes against the facts. Everyone has problems. That's why it's possible to get a job as a psychotherapist or councilor. Saying there will be no more progress is really saying whatever problems we have now cannot be solved. Why say that? Because then our suffering isn't our fault. It might be possible to argue that some of our problems are insoluble, but certainly not all or most of them.

That leaves the other option: just like in 1700, we are in denial. I think this is broadly the case. When we say that temper tantrums are an inevitable part of parenting, that is not because there is no possible way to avoid fighting with our children, its because we don't want to see ourselves as failures. When we say children do bad things because they are children, that is avoiding facing the fact that we could have given better advice. (Some problems like that aren't foreseeable, but certainly some are.) When we say that "love hurts", we are denying that our own approach to relationships hurts us. When we divorce and insist vehemently that our partner is an evil bastard, we have to: if he wasn't a lying manipulator then it would have been possible to see the flaws in the relationship in advance. We didn't choose the wrong person, he tricked us! In all these examples we might be blameless, but sometimes there is something we could have done better, and assuming it might be partially our fault will help us find that out.

I want to move past this to a kinder view that expects mistakes and problems, and sees finding them as a positive step. We should feel good about discovering we were wrong: now we have a better shot at being right next time. Or if there won't be a next time for us, at least we could tell our children. And if it's important enough, we could write a book and tell the world.

We all have a lot of bad ideas. That's understandable. And it's excusable -- no, better than that: we don't need any excuse at all. But let's at least get one thing right: we aren't perfect. Most of the problems we face are caused by human mistakes. That's the most optimistic belief we can have because humans are capable of correcting their own mistakes.