Posts by Tom Beard
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Right, deep breath. I've gone all the way through your "Intrinsic Problems" article, Stephen, and while the graph theory is intriguing (it's been a long time since I studied, and only to about stage 3, so I probably missed some subtleties), I think the whole argument is fundamentally flawed by your basic assumptions.
It starts with a "background conception of what marriage is - preeminently that it's a voluntary love relationship with high degrees of personal fulfillment and intimacy as its normal aspiration". That's not a definition of marriage, it's a definition of love. "Marriage" is a legal construct that extends a range of rights and responsibilities to (a subset of) people who enter into such voluntary love relationship (VLRs), should they so choose. While you rightly say that in all but fraudulent cases (such as marriages purely for immigration or student loan purposes), people who get married have a VLR, not everyone in a VLR chooses the rights and responsibilities of marriage (presuming they are allowed), for instance because they're not interested in sharing property or having children. Also, your definition includes brief but intense flings as well as platonic friendships and familial relationships.
So, the rest of the article constitutes not of an argument against poly marriage per se, but against the possibility that VLRs can deliver "high degrees of personal fulfillment and intimacy". You consider this a prerequisite for a "marriage-like" relationship, and that thus relationships structurally incapable of delivering this fulfillment should not be given the legal status of marriage - a highly debatable point in itself, but one I won't go into. The core of your graph-theoretical analysis aims to show that any relationship where n>2 cannot deliver the "high degrees of personal fulfillment and intimacy" that can occur when n=2.
The vital assumption behind this is in 3.1, where you write "their normal expectations for fulfillment and intimacy, analyzed in the first instance just in terms of time elapsed ... are guaranteed to go unmet". As far as I could see, all of your analysis uses time elapsed as a proxy for fulfillment and intimacy, and there seems to be no "second instance" where you seriously examine any other dimensions. And equating fulfillment and intimacy with time spent is just utterly, stonkingly, face-palmingly wrong. There's a strong correlation in most cases, but it's so far from a clean linear relationship that the clean algebra of your argument becomes useless. And that's even assuming that intimacy can be quantified, which I doubt.
Another flaw is the underlying assumption of equivalence; the idea of "normal expectations". Whose normal expectations? Yours? Everyone has different expectations of the quantity and (vitally important) the qualities of their interactions with their intimate partners. All of your calculations and decimal labelling ignore this.
Despite the veneer of mathematical rigour, your arguments often come down to personal preferences, prejudice or flat-out denial. You claim that "significant irreducible shared time is impossible" based upon the statement "it's very hard to believe that two or more relationships with the depth of marriages can be conducted substantially, let alone exclusively in parallel time and in a shared space". That's not an argument, it's an admission of your lack of imagination. If you don't believe in hyper-edges and shared time, I've some RedTube links I could give you. You follow Neitzsche's comparison of a marriage to a conversation, then state that any conversation with more than two people must have "less depth". Boy, you must be a riot at dinner parties.
All this would be fine if it were just ethico-mathematical sophistry for the sake of it; a diverting game of arguing about how many angels can get married on the head of a pin. But you seem to be making a serious argument, and suggesting that legal rights should be denied to certain people on this basis, in which case your dismissal of empiricism at the expense of "conceptual" costs and benefits is unforgivable. If you want to construct a mathematical argument for a legal position, make sure you get your axioms right. And if your axioms are about "personal fulfillment and intimacy" for people who might want a poly marriage, then you can bloody well start by asking some poly people what fulfillment and intimacy mean to them.
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Stephen: I shouldn't really comment, since I haven't read your articles, and I'm the last one to complain about over-intellectualising or seeing everything as mathematics. But I'm pretty sure that phrases such as "logically and mathematically necessary features", "conceptual costs and benefits" and "an in principle locus for (has the potential to host) high-bandwidth fulfillment" are not the most useful way to talk about loving and fucking.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Emma Hart,
that illegal double team
Wait ... I thought you said that wasn't illegal?
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Stephen Judd,
That's well taken care of.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
until we've sorted all the ins and outs of the two-person legal relationship. After all, physicists have had nearly four hundred years and still haven't got a solution.
Rest assured: we have some top people working on solutions to the n-body problem for increasing values of n. One promising line of research derives from the observation that the formation of n-body clusters is greatly enhanced by the application of rum.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Emma Hart,
It's the polly amory joke I told a bunch of derby girls at The Green Room one night last June...
I think I should remember that. I must have been distracted.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Emma Hart,
the way polyamory seems to have been lumped together with bestiality and paedophilia as 'the worst things we could think of to smear same-sex marriage with".
And incest. And Muslims.
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More seriously, while polyamory is not illegal, neither is it legally recognised in the way that marriage is, with the ensuing rights, responsibilities and privileges.
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I presume the title is a Polly Amory joke?
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Hard News: Where do you get yours?, in reply to Peter Darlington,
Yep, my kids play a lot of tunes straight off YouTube. It's only the keepers that they nick...
It took me a while to realise that I didn't actually own the last LCD Soundsystem album, because I was playing Home, Dance Yrself Clean and Drunk Girls so often on YouTube. Now that I've bought the album through iTunes, I've found that I've only played it a couple of times. Not sure what that says.
And while we're on the subject of YouTube, I realise that about 80% of the video content I've consumed through all media (including broadcast TV) over the last year has been uploaded by the golden god known as Nick From Fulham.