Marriage history, again

So...when a topic is on my mind, I worry it until it's good 'n dead...here we go again.

Pre-agriculture (Before 10KBC):

The clan fulfilled 90% of the job of the modern marriage: Raising children, cleaning, preparing food, providing food, long-term close relationship. Only thing missing for women by just being part of a clan was sex...which is usually freely available (for women). For men...there was no paternity guarantee, but otherwise, there was moderately large availability of sex, if not necessarily of reproduction.

Post-agriculture (10KBC-1950AD):

Individual Property mostly destroys the clan as a fundamental unit. Hierarchical structures are created. Settled living makes cleaning a HUGE job as compared to nomadic life. With no clan, and individual property, pairing was the only way that either men or women could survive (well, or even decently). 160 hour family-work-week to survive. Child-rearing was still mostly communal. Natural work-sharing associated with efficient agriculture and warfare puts men in charge of economics, and thus in charge of everything. Men have purchased semi-guaranteed paternity, but decreased their sexual variety. Women have lost a lot.

Prosperity (1950AD->near future):

Technological advance destroys the necessity of a 2-member household for the middle class. Washing Machines, Dishwashers, Microwaves...a person no longer requires 40-80 hours a week to keep house for themselves, but instead, can do it in 10. Work-weeks drop from 80 hour weeks down towards 40 and under. Whereas historically, the required family work-week was 160 hours...it's down near 50...if you want to be comfortably lower-middle class, and you're of average skill.

Government advance destroys the necessity of males for the lower classes, and blacks especially. Welfare in general, and especially AFDC makes the economics of being a poor single woman BETTER than the economics of being a poor married woman. Disproportionate black incarceration rates (33% of all males at one point or another?) decrease the supply, therefore substantially increasing the cost of a Black male ... and women tend strongly to prefer same-race partners.

Marriage at this point, from an economic analysis, is a rich-people-game. We're on the verge of: only if you're in the rat race, trying to stay ahead of the Jones's does marriage matter economically at all. Solo, men are BETTER off economically without marriage. Solo, women are MILDLY worse off economically without marriage. But since freedom is a very valuable good... the mild worseness economically is not enough to maintain the institution.

Childcare is a(the?) HUGE problem. School is evil. Clans don't exist yet. Grandparents often still work. And workweeks haven't yet hit the 20hrs/week to a comfortable life yet.

Some women still trade freedom against wealth...but the number is falling. As wealth rises, the marginal value of additional wealth falls...and the value of freedom rises. Furthermore, divorce law is sufficiently unpleasant at this point that men are dodging marriage as well.

Next Generation:
Wealth rises...marriage rates fall...Robotics / Artificial Stupids on the rise...medicine does better and better against VD. Note that for both men and women, in general, we don't mind sharing partners, if it's not an owned partner. If I meet a girl and have a roll in the hay...I don't mind if my friends tumble her also...UNLESS I'm thinking of keeping her. My experience with girls is much the same, without ownership, they don't mind sharing.
Best outcome? Rebuilt clans. Small groups (dozens? less?) of friends build large extended families with low ownership, along the line of Heinlein line-marriages...or modern poly-semi-fi.

Worrisome outcome? No clans, further fragmentation.

Really worrisome outcome? Kurzweilian Sexbot/AI companions replacing marriage. Can this result in an Octavia Butler style sex-intermediary?

PoTD

Yesterday, I had a PoTW, but this bit from Falkenstein is required reading.

Productivity was DOUBLED by reducing SOME of the regulations.

Moderately anti-government readers, this is required re-linking. Government regulation and regulators are THE problem.

As pointed out by Virginia Postrel many years ago...Bush II was a big-government guy on every aspect you can count, except federal regulations. If you want to love Bush for something, look at the rate of increase in the federal register under Bush...he was darn good at NOT having extra law.

PoTW

Best intra-libertarian argument I've heard in a long time. Kevin Carson responds to Anthony Gregory's position, who was in turn responding to Kevin Carson's treatment of Mitt Romney's on Corporations. Why is the argument so good? Because Carson is so clear in laying out the opposing positions. I don't think that after you read it, you have to agree with Kevin. However, odds are that if you don't read it, you just don't understand.

Please, RTWT...even though it's long. You don't have to read the 2 prior positions...but Kevin's final position is eloquent. Perhaps some of the folks who read this blog and find my left-libertarianism thoroughly crazy will find it more understandable (though likely no more correct) in reading Kevin.

Trends

Suppose you see a trend that's been true for somewhere between 400 and 4 Billion years. Suppose that you are aware that folks have been predicting the demise of the trend for between 250 and 2500 years...and have been consistently (read 100%) wrong. What's the correct response of a rationalist.

Aretae's claim:
Under most circumstances...sane folks believe the trend continues as before, despite doomsaying.

Resource abundance...we have a 500 year history of doomsayers predicting the end of natural resource X...and being wrong on every count, not just in absolute terms, but in relative terms. Every useful non-renewable resource is CHEAPER now than it was either 500 years ago or on discovery. I have to conclude that folks who believe that resources are coming to an end are caught in a logic trap...sounds sensible, but fails to predict a damn thing.

Moral decay...we have a continuous history of 2500 years of folks talking moral decay. Every outcome-based measure of moral state that is has been improving, if not monotonically, for that time period.

Rate of Change ... we have a 2 billion year history, since the dawn of life on earth, where the 2nd derivative (rate of change of rate of change) has been positive, with state changes every N doublings. Most calculations put the next state change sometime in the next 50 years...with rate of change (following constant trends) expected to move economic doubling time from on the order of a couple decades (2% growth = 3.5 decades, 8% growth = <1 decade) to the order of a couple weeks.

Liberty ... liberty appears to be a superior good after some level of income. For all of known history, human beings who have become rich have basically abandoned all pretense at following standard social rules, and spent huge chunks of their wealth preventing normal rules from applying to them. Social constraint and conformity is a poor-people activity, performed painfully, because they are forced to. Rich people, regardless of their deserving-ness (read lottery, accident of birth), simply don't.

Government ... governments universally (over time) seek to expand power over people, and just as universally, in their expanding power, make life worse. The existence of some examples (Singapore, Hong Kong) for some time frames (<50 years) does not disprove a 2500 year hypothesis.

Autocracy ... The more power that is vested in a single individual ... the worse for the citizenry.

Organizations ... The bureaucracy runs all organizations, unless an organization is near failure. Leaders are 90% irrelevant, regardless their formal power.

Feedback is the whole deal ... systems live and die based on how feedback-responsive they are. This is basically true for 2 billion years, from the dawn of life. Better responsiveness to change always wins (+/- 3%).


My claim is very simple...the claims I have above are the default, no-thinking-required basic assumptions and anyone wishing to argue against them has a large burden of proof.

Resource Abundance

1. Uinta Basin? Local US Oil appears to be able to supply the world for ... a century?
2. Nebraska + Japanese Rare Earth finds?

What's the next non-renewable scare...I need to watch for it in the news in the next few weeks. Julian Simon: When 400 years of history say the results ALWAYS work out the same way, and some scientist says: But I calculate we'll run out...believe the history.

Sci Fi

Sonic Charmer points us at a top 100 list of sci-fi...and then lists what he's read by bolding. Sounds fun:

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
28. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

David Brin's Uplift series is missing, and shouldn't be.
Fritz Leiber also.
Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle / Dorsai books.

Update:
One of my favorites ever is The First Immortal by James Halperin.
Also...I accidentally read a series on the list in the last couple days...so I'm updating the list. Didn't know it was on the list when I read it.

And...

If you don't read Paul Hsieh @ geekpress, you just really ought to. Always linking to good stuff.

Today:
Gandalf vs. Dumbledore
Image...enlarge and read. rly.

Diet/etc. -- mine

So...after leaving Chicago, where my weight hovered between 200 and 205, already far beyond what I'd been comfortable with before then, I moved to California, and got fat. On my cross-country trip this last month, I weighed myself, and observed that I'd hit 222.5. So...after coming home from the Manila, I was mad and got aggressive on diet.

Hard, high-fat paleo:
NO caloric beverages.
Meat, Dairy, Vegetables and beans. Full stop.

I went to caffeine pills to avoid drinking the coffee with sugar in it. Being a supertaster myself, the bitterness in uncreamed coffee nearly kills me...so I just bailed on coffee. 14 days later, I forgot to take my coffee-equivalent dose of caffeine today...and I'm fine. I think I'm full off-caffeine...or at least I will be in a day or two.

Every day, waking up, I eat a helping or so of super-thick, creamy, full-fat yogurt. Greek Gods brand...I've tried Fage, Liberte (2nd choice), and several other brands, but the Greek Gods stuff is almost ice cream/cream cheese consistency...and the honey-yogurt is just fabulous.

For breakfast, several hours later, I eat 3 scrambled eggs, with butter to cook, and cheese on top, and then Ms. Renfrow's habenero salsa...and perhaps some bacon (2 days of 10).

For lunch...sometime mid-afternoon, I have another helping of yogurt.

And then dinner is hard paleo.

Saturday: Salmon over steamed spinach.
Sunday: off-day...ate like a pig, high carb.
Monday: Roasted chicken + carrots
Tuesday: Aretae's famous cross between Chicken + Paneer Makhni (creamy tomato-curry with chicken and paneer) over buttered cauliflower (no aloo)
Wednesday: Burgers without buns ... ice tea to drink.
Thursday: Steak + Salmon with a homemade Tsatziki sauce.

And then for dessert, either Trader Joes ice cream, or else more yogurt (Dang, but it's good).


I've taken (in the last couple days) to swigging flax-seed oil as well...2 tbsp in the evenings

Last week, when I was perfect on the diet, I lost half a pound a day.
This week, I've been imperfect ... but I'm shocked at how well it's going. I feel great too.

I'm on 2-3 times a week of relatively hard exercise (for 10 minutes)...

Overall...I'm doing great. We'll see how well the weight-loss persists.

Left Libertarian Watch

Charles Johnson, guest-blogging at BHL, argues for free-market anti-capitalism. Core idea:

[T]he Capitalist Causal Hypothesis:

(CCH) If you have “capitalism” in sense 1 (an economy without intense, extensive, and ongoing government intervention), then you’ll naturally tend to get “capitalism” in senses 3 and 4 (large-scale concentrations of ownership, a for-profit corporate economy, a wage-labor system, etc.).

The pro-capitalist Right likes the outcome, and the state socialist does not, so the one uses it as a reason to endorse “capitalism” and the other as a reason to reject it. (Conventional liberals typically split the difference by calling for a mix of pro-business regulation and anti-business regulation, in order to get a properly managed form of capitalism, with political forces in place to countervail against its worse tendencies.) But what of those who reject the causal claim asserted by (CCH)? For an individualist like Tucker, “capitalism” in the sense of wage-labor and commercialism has been largely upheld, and sustained by “pro-business” government intervention, not by free market processes

Post OTD

Penelope Trunk: A life plan for women.

Must read. Large doses of sanity. Even if you're a guy.

QotW

Penn Jillette:

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

Competition is mostly Local

Big difficulties I have with an awful lot of folks is that many folks are worrying about competitions between unions and companies, or hispanics and blacks, or whatever.

In real life, that's not mostly the way things work. Competition is between like types. I choose which strawberries to buy at the farmer's market from any of 5 different mexican farmers. I go to grocery stores at any of 7 grocers in town. The grocer hires checkers from the older teen/early twenties population.

Competition is 95% intra-group, and 5% inter-group.

What do minimum wage laws do? drive $ to the already successful grocery checkers who have jobs, and decrease the number of jobs.

What do unions do? Drive $ to the already employed, at the expense of potential workers. The company? Largely (not completely) unaffected.

What do trash disposal regulations do? Mostly, decrease competition between garbage providers.

Who are the primary job-losses to from illegal immigration? Already present illegal immigrants. Sometimes other spanish-speaking locals.

What do ALL job licenses do? Privilege existing participants vs. new entrants.

If you were to assume that all competition was local, you'd be awfully close to right. And we'd stop hearing silliness about (a) regulations helping workers as a class, or (b) immigrants stealing our jobs.

Marriage -- part 937

I am personally happily married, and as far as I've been able to tell, the modern world doesn't have a replacement for marriage in the space of child-rearing...thus I strongly support marriage for child-health / mental-health reasons.

HOWEVER, I think I've stabilized my thoughts on marriage:

Pre-10KYA:
Tribal, mobile, non-food-storing, egalitarian living...no permanent sexual pairings...communal child-rearing, with all adults functioning as effective aunt/uncle/close neighbor caring for the children...no privacy...no property to speak of (besides what you can carry). An individual needs to work ~3 hours a day to maintain food/shelter.

~10KYA:
Agriculture. People get much poorer, very fast. Property rights become essential . Property rights split individuals from tribes. The work of preparing/cooking/cleaning/etc. + the work of growing food is simply too much for any single individual. Men + Women split off into pairs, mostly because men are much better off evolutionarily when they can semi-guarantee paternity. False-paternity rates in the 15-33% range indicate that the semi-guarantee sucks, and that folks are still not monogamous, regardless the line. Men own the economics, and institutionalize ownership of everything by men. On the other hand, 12 hour days of work are considered short.

~1950-2010:
Wealth returns. People get smarter again, and taller, and such. The amount of work required to prepare, cook, clean, etc. for a household drops from 84 hours a week down to 14...5 if you eat out a lot. A Man's economic need for a partner falls roughly to zero. Men finally release the stranglehold they've had on economics for 10,000 years, and women join the workforce, and now make, on a careful analysis, more than men for comparable jobs, comparable hours (Really, it's less $ for less hours and lower stress jobs). On the poor side, welfare pops up, and provides the resources that a father would have. Women's net economic need for men falls like a stone.

~2050:
Another doubling and some of wealth has brought average Western annual income to $100,000 per year in constant 2010 dollars. Women working half-time make paychecks in the $50K + benefits range; the Flying Roomba mark 47 can clean the whole (average 5000 sq.ft.) house with precision laser dust-zappers in 42 seconds flat. and the destruction of the economic need for marriage is complete. The normal state is that women work half-time, screw whomsoever they please, and as per 10,000 years ago, own the decision of whom to have babies with. Some men, mostly ones in the $1M+/y annual income range (10x average) contract for exclusivity, and some women find that level of resources to be worthwhile to trade against freedom...while everyone else is in the sex-market permanently. Very different than what we have now.

Disagreement oTD

Brad DeLong:

America's best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible

Arnold Kling:

DeLong's dream of technocratic governance is some people's nightmare.

Fundamentally, I have NO interest in effective technocratic government...be that as humane as the Danish or as efficient as Singapore. I am interested in getting the government the f*** out of my life.

Interestingly, that puts me at odds with my favorite thinker on the interwebs, Robin Hanson. Hanson explaining why he's not a libertarian in 2 sentences:

I’m an economist who appreciates the economic analysis of law. I know how very useful property and contract can be in achieving economic efficiency. But the most efficient forms of property and contract are not obviously only these libertarian ones

I am personally a humanist libertarian, who values both freedom AND wealth independently. I will occasionally tolerate a trade of freedom for wealth...and occasionally tolerate a trade of wealth for freedom, but in neither case am I happy with the trade.

Assorted

• Best argument I've seen AGAINST my belief in 10K hours. Shifts my belief in pure 10Kh downwards. Not addressing all the issues I'd like to address (quality of motivation, effectiveness of practice), but it does address some (Talent drives practice, and Play-to-learn -- huge component of my thought process). Overall, it's looking more and more like Skill = practice * talent factor, and talent factor runs near 1.6x / Stdv. Thus a natural 5-sigma outlier (like me in math, or an arbitrary NBA player in basketball) just gets better 10x faster than average. HT: Tyler Cowen.
  
• IOZ, my favorite over-the-top hard-left anarchist says this about the current crop of politicians, quoted in full:

  I guess liberals are gleeful over the generally nutty display at last night's GOP shindig, but I will say this for the Republicans--as a matter of pure aesthetics, they have produced once again a genuine bestiary of real American types, whereas every time I see a gathering of Democrats, they seem to have beamed straight from some nearby planet, speak through slightly glitchy universal translators, learned human mannerisms from watching distant television broadcasts that have at long last diffused through space. You may think that Mitt Romney is a huge fake, and you're right; but even he is recognizably homo americanus: the hair, the smile, the "my friend," the gladhanding--he's a classic bonhommian businesstype; Bachman is no nuttier than any other PTA or Little League lady I've had the displeasure to know; Ron Paul is as affable and futilely beloved as any barroom political crank; even the crackpot pizzabaron is comfortably of the same species as you and me. Barack Obama on the other hand seems like a holodeck beta test.

• Bias-Lord Hanson calls out the Beauty Bias.
• Anarchism: Mel sends us over to Agreeable Anarchism, where there's a huge supply of anarchist links. Most interesting thus far is still Jeff Riggenbach laughing at the idea that states are the important part of history.

The kinds of things left-libs/anarchists think about

When a city/municipality/county/state has a tax rate...and they offer exemptions from said tax rate for large organizations to set up operations...this is effectively a tax on small business.

When a governing unit has a regulation...it is near-universally true that absolute cost of compliance grows slower than size of company. This is effectively a tax that falls more heavily on small businesses than large businesses.

The core question in government is NOT poor/rich or worker/employer. It's independent & self-employed & small business & small business employees vs. government & large business & large business employees.

Large Unions, Corporate CEOs, government bureaucrats, etc. are all on the same (basic) side, except for minor squabbling about splitting the loot.

Individuals + folks outside the big bureaucracies are the other team...and the structure of government itself is built to screw those people.

Why I like the term Fascist

Because it describes the modern US pretty well.

The captains of industry (CEO of Goldman Sach's/CEO of General Electric) and the Political Bosses are...the same people? How odd. Surely their interests/preferences/thought patterns change rapidly when they switch back and forth between jobs...

And which party is this true for? Oh, right. All of them.

QoTD

Sheldon Richman:

Unless you want world government, you're already an anarchist. We're just haggling over the level.

Rant of The Day

Brutus: The war between black people and niggas

Sex At Dawn

The book shakes the foundations of what's "Natural" in the human animal's sexuality. Core thesis:

Humans of neither gender are naturally monogamous, and expecting them to be is NUTS.

Core evidence: Look at the 2 other animals we are closest related to: Chimps + Bonobos. Also, look at human biology. Also, look at non-propertarian/pre-agricultural cultures.

1. Evidence from modern pre-ag societies:
Pre-property, marriage either doesn't exist, or doesn't assume sexual exclusivity.
Other folks writing on the topic (Pinker, for instance) discuss primitive folks (Yanomamo, for instance) who are at least 50% an agricultural society...which isn't representative of pre-agricultural societies. Summarizing a quote from the book: Pinker discussing forager societies is like hearing someone discussing African societies, and picking 7 examples: Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, The Philippines, India, and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is arguably African, but barely...and the other 6 aren't at all. Repeating the core thesis: If we look at non-agricultural, non-food-storing, forager-type societies...sexual exclusivity is at best a rare outlier, and more likely, non-existent.

2. Evidence from common ancestors:
Unlike most other known animals/mammals, our two closest genetic relatives (Chimps + Bonobos) both are highly non-monogamous, and highly sexual. Whereas other apes/monkeys/mammals have only rare, fertile sex, and usually in a polygynous arrangement, our two closest genetic relatives have frequent, multi-partner, fertility-agnostic sex.

3. Evidence from biology:
If you look at human beings...it's fairly obvious that of ALL animals, humans are among the best-designed for sperm-based competition for reproduction. Basically...our enormous, mushroom shaped dicks and massive testes (or mine anyhow) make sense evolutionarily only in an environment of substantial sperm competition: multiple men mating with a single woman.

3b. Other, minor evidence from biology:
Female mating vocalization. Rare in animals...serves to make other nearby men aroused. Evolutionary purpose?
Female orgasmic patterns. Average duration to orgasm per woman vs. average duration to orgasm per man?


Summary:
We roughly have pretty strong evidence that pre-agricultural pre-historic humans and pre-humans (10KBC back to 10MBC) were nothing that even resembles monogamous. Multi-male multi-female mating has been the norm in our ancestors for the last 10M years, with a minor blip in the last 10KY.

Aretae speaking now, no longer just summarizing:

The modern institution of marriage is a result of two factors:

A. Property.
B. Male Ownership.

With property, which exists for the first time (for real) in Agricultural Society, there is a question of how property passes from generation to generation.

With Male Ownership of property, men have a desire to pass property to their own genetic descendents. Therefore, given that they own property, they can force the women to do their will, and then work very hard to control the naturally promiscuous human female.

The fact that we have psychology hacks, and ownership fears, and that game-players can lie (stretch the truth) so as to get what they want doesn't make it natural, or even tolerable to human psychology of either gender.

Again, the Aretaevian prediction:
Marriage is dead within 30 years. As the current age of scarcity comes to a close, marriage has no way to survive the natural disinclination of both sexes towards monogamy.

Unfortunately, the historical replacement for marriage seems to have been clan-level poly-fidelity (+swinging with other-clans) , with communal child-rearing. And the child-rearing property-transferring purpose of marriage is NOT being served by any current arrangement, unless it's the 6 modern poly-fi clans.

May you live in interesting times.

PoTD

On Anarchism -- Is the big lie that states mattered in history?

Jetlag observations

Most interesting thing about jetlag for me...it hits on day 2. When I flew to Manila, I was fine on the day I arrived (Sunday 10pm), and Monday in Manila was fine. But Tuesday? I was a complete mess, and went to bed without eating dinner. Similarly, on Wednesday, I also went to bed very early.

Similarly...on the flight home, I was fine through most of Sunday (I arrived at 10am), but on Monday I could barely see straight, and today I'm not much better...excepting my nap.

Not used to that.

Back from Manila

Jetlagged, also.

Food in Manila

Food in Manila has been tremendously interesting. I've had quite a variety of foods, eating only Filipino foods for lunch and dinner, basically doing as my hosts suggest, and trying things. Summary: They eat more parts than we do. As far as I've been able to tell, pork is the staple food, but they use the whole damn pig.

Monday for lunch, I ate with 7 friends, and shared several dishes:
Sisig, among the first dishes I ate here is basically fried, chopped Pig's head.
Kare-Kare was also eaten at that meal: Oxtail and Tripe stew.
Gising Gising: A vegetable curry dish that was supposed to be spicy.
A meatball soup that I can't find described

Yesterday evening I had dinner at Fely J's.
I don't know what I had:

Beef ribs in a heavy meaty gravy. Very tasty.
Vegetables + Shrimp. Tolerable.
Coconut Water with coconut chunks in it: I disliked it.
Halo Halo with just mango and flan for desert.

Yesterday for lunch I ate Barbeque with 4 others
Dishes:
Pork Barbeque, which I had yesterday for lunch, looked an awful lot like a Kebab or a Satay, but in between every piece of meat was a piece of fried pork Fat. The table next to mine
BBQ milkfish...which was awful tasty. Served with (I think) shredded pickled yellow radish. Yummy.
One of the tables nearby had a BBQ squid. Whole, large squid, BBQ'd then chopped into rings

But that's just normal food. I'm learning a lot, but I haven't super-clicked with any of the foods yet.

But...being as I haven't gone to a rich hotel catering to rich foreigners in a foreign country in 10 years...I forgot HOW good the (complementary) breakfasts are.
They are phenomenal.

Typical Breakfast buffet in 5 stations:
Fresh coffee grown down the street being ground in the restaurant, and made into coffee.
Best yogurt I've ever had in my life. Uber-creamy. I prefer the cherry to the blueberry or plain.
Fresh fruits (picked outside, I'm pretty sure): Mango & Pineapple. There are a half-dozen others, but they don't really matter against good sweet/sour mango and pinapple.
Of course there's also fresh squeezed mango + pinapple + other juices.
Bacon, eggs, sausage, omlettes.
A euro-style meats+cheeses breakfast area.
A sashimi bar with only 4 choices. Pickled Ginger, Pickled yellow radish, soy sauce, wasabi. I had some today, and my goodness it was good. I could live on this.
Natto. I tried it finally today...it was wierd. It would take a while to get to like it. Reminded me of a cheese that I didn't yet like.
Assorted foods from Asia (Samosa, Pancit, etc.)
Soups (EXCELLENT Miso soup.)

Usually, after breakfast I can barely walk...there's so much good food.

As of right now, with my emphasis on meat, vegetables, fermented foods, and taste...I'm convinced that NO ONE eats as well as the japanese. Sashimi + miso + pickled Veggies + soy is something I could live on for a LONG time.

Sex At Dawn book

Main thing I'm reading right now is the book Sex at Dawn. Wow. I read the book a lot like Taubes Good Calories, Bad Calories: The stuff you think you know...from an evolutionary perspective... is very likely to be wrong. So far...I see one major unaddressed position in his thinking, and will blog it later. However, it's fairly solid in its demolishing of the standard narrative.

Summary:
Paleo (healthy) sexuality is very similar to paleo (healthy) diets in that it looks NOTHING like the modern western option. Rather, agriculture is entirely responsible for the modern state of affairs.

At this point, I am thinking that if you're a reactionary, you should consider going back not the 300 years that you want to go back and freeze things, but 10,000 years to forager approaches. If nothing else, it puts strong nails in the coffin of the idea that there is a "better way" appropriate to all approaches...and suggests that economic realities strongly define culture.

I'm almost 100% sold on hanson's forager/farmer rich/poor ethics distinction now. The ethics of the reactionary are the ethics of a farmer or a poor person. They simply don't work for rich folks. And everyone is now rich in the west. Rich people don't now, and never in history have thought that way...nor will they ever. The only paths to the reactionary position is bomb (or government) folks back into poverty...or to wait the hundreds/thousands of years until we actually hit malthusian limits against our technological progress.

Sex at Dawn is up there with Hierarchy in the Forest as required reading. Your imaginings of how people actually were historically are precisely that: imaginings. Want data? Read something that has data.