“I place a .5 likelihood of being able to finish it within an hour.” FAMOUS LAST WORDS. Not every engineering class gives equal amounts of homework, and if I’d so much as looked through it beforehand, I’d've known better.

The first thing I noticed was that it was looonnnnngggg. The problem statements alone were five pages! And they were worded compactly: one problem was comprised of a list of six things to answer for each subproblem, and then a list of six subproblems. There was a great deal of graph-drawing, and then —

It told me to plot something using Simulink.

What in Programming is Simulink?

Accordingly, as a spoiled programmer who is used to the Zoo computers having everything, I headed to the Zoo and searched the applications folder, and I couldn’t find it! Eventually, some Googling around teaches me that Simulink has to be run from Matlab. Another half hour goes by while I work out how to use this thing. I didn’t know how to get reasonable plots from it either, so I exported the simulated data into Matlab and plotted it there instead.

I did finish, but it was a big fiasco. It took about three times as long as I was expecting. I’ve seen how this class’s problem sets behave, and I’ve learned my lesson. That won’t be happening again.

“What is your objective basis for calling anything right or wrong?”

I was recently asked this question, and I believe it deserves a thorough answer. In The Relativity of Wrong, Isaac Asimov answered a similar challenge. Asimov’s challenger claimed that scientists in every generation were always wrong, and I am happy we have moved past that. But wielding wrong’s relativity like a weapon is dangerous without the proper background as well. It is time we had a sequel.

It is popular and in favor to assert that all claims have merit. This is what happens in a great many philosophy courses, where the student learns of many philosophical systems and is then told why each is useful in some ways and wrong in others. This is what happens in regards to beliefs, where criticizing beliefs is bad, and you’re supposed to respect everything.

But just because right and wrong are fuzzy does not mean that everything is equally valid. It does not mean we shouldn’t ever call anything “wrong” or “right”. Most importantly, it does not mean we should say, everything is both right and wrong.

Of course, we know it is valid to say claim that a leaf is green or that a chair has four legs. What I’m interested in is what does it mean to say a belief is right?

When I say something is right, I mean that it can be used to make accurate predictions about the world. For example, the doctor says he believes a certain medicine helps people recover from the flu faster. We look at many cases of the flu. After many people recover, some with the medicine and some without, we look at how long it took them on average, and it turns out people who took the medicine did indeed recover faster. Then we say the doctor was right.

Einstein said that the sun’s gravity could bend light rays. He said that the position of certain stars should appear to shift as the stars passed behind the sun. In 1919, the eclipse actually happened, and observations of the stars were as he predicted. We say that Einstein was right.

People believe that their preferred deities can intervene in people’s illnesses. Although studies have found that prayer has psychological benefits, no sign of divine intervention has been found. A ten-year study of patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery found that patients who’d been prayed for actually had worse health than those who hadn’t (although the study attributes that to chance).

“But,” I hear my hypothetical opponent arguing. “My friend this-person prayed and recovered quickly.” What about the patients who were prayed for and had complications? “It only works if you know the person you’re praying for.” For each seemingly-miraculous story about near-death person recovering, what about all those who don’t? “Those people must have not been really devout / pure / worthy in some way.” Or perhaps “god works in mysterious ways.” How do I tell if someone was worthy then? If I can only tell after the fact, that’s not an advance prediction.

When a person holds a belief, that is a model of the world. The person says, I believe this is how the world works. The doctor believes things about medicine, and Einstein believed things about physics. How well your belief predicts things that will happen determines how right you are.

Only once you are right can you begin to hack the world around you.

People used to believe that human bodies were made of four kinds of biles, and all diseases were caused by imbalances of the biles. Germ theory (the idea that microorganisms cause diseases) became accepted in the 1800s, and after that people could fix things they couldn’t fix before. It was because we understood diseases better. We got this thing right, and then we used our knowledge to change our fates. People who used to die of things could now live.

People used to believe that heavier things fell faster. Newton showed that golf balls and bowling balls fall at the same speed, and many other things about physics as well. People used to believe that the Sun went around the Earth, and now we know better. We were wrong before, and now we are right. On August 20th, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 space probe. It was timed to pass by all four outer planets. Astronomers calculated the planets would line up neatly as they orbited the Sun, and this was only possible by assuming a Sun-centered solar system. Voyager 2 reached Uranus on within a second of its predicted time on January 24, 1986, eight years and five months after it left Earth. One second, out of eight and a half years! It could not have done that if we were wrong about physics or wrong about the layout of the solar system. It couldn’t've left Earth at all. Sending wonderful human-made creatures out into space means predicting how they will move in space, and planning its actions accordingly. If our predictions are wrong, it never would’ve worked at all.

It is important that our beliefs have predictive power! The world is much like a program where we have to figure out the language. But each time we get something right, that knowledge gives us a bit more control. We learned that microorganisms affect our bodies, and now we can put things in that kill certain microorganisms and foster others. We couldn’t have light bulbs or computers until we could control electricity. A person who can accurately predict how others react to things they say will do better in job interviews. If you can predict what happens to ingredients, you’ll be a better baker. Each time we decipher a bit of the language, we can then wield it to rewrite the code, expunge the illness, build the comforts, and discover more of the language.

Today, there is controversy over global warming. People who believe humans are causing it predict that the average temperature on Earth will get warmer during the next century. People who do not predict that Earth will not. That is the difference between everything staying as it is and New York City being underwater. Our policies will depend on our predictions, and so it is important that our predictions be correct!

Of course there is such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong. If we exchange something that is wrong for something that is right, we move forward, and the human condition becomes a little bit better. If, however, we exchange the right for the wrong, then we do ourselves injustice. Teaching our children intelligent design makes them slightly less knowledgeable about biology. In the future, they will want to study sickle-cell anemia and fail to realize why it is more prevalent among some groups; want to save the cheetahs and fail to understand the genetic bottleneck; want to study sociology and fail to learn from chimpanzee tribes. These are all powers that understanding evolution gives us. We could lose those powers. We could teach our children an outdated astronomy with the Earth at the center. In the future, they will try to send out space probes and wonder why the planets are never where they predict. We could teach our children to pray for their ill. In the future, they will wonder why their god is so cruel.

Astrology is wrong; astronomy is right.
Alchemy is wrong; chemistry is right.
Creationism is wrong; evolution is right.

Each thing that we can say is wrong or right is a triumph wrought from the toils of our forbears, a treasured word of an ancient and powerful language. I’m proud of how much we know.

I remember very sharply a study I read about in high school. It stated that left-handed people were more likely to die at a younger age than right-handed people, and that even controlling for accidents caused by right-handed equipment and machinery, the difference still persisted.

The conductors of the study received death threats after it was published.

Excuse me?

I remember feeling outraged. If that’s what the results showed, why should the scientists be blamed? It’s not like they caused the results. They probably didn’t even want them. I wondered what, if anything, the angry threat-mailers wanted them to do. Would they have preferred the scientists just not publish their results? If it’s a true statement that left-handed people die sooner, then what good comes from not publishing it?

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

That’s a catchy slogan. What does it mean?

In Galileo’s time, when he claimed the Earth went around the sun, such a statement was theologically inconvenient. The church put him on trial and demanded that he rescind his statements, even though they were true.

The “Doctors’ Plot” was a plot outlined by Stalin and Soviet officials in 1952 and 1953 whereby several doctors (over half of whom were Jewish) allegedly attempted to kill Soviet officials. The prevailing opinion of many scholars outside the Soviet Union is that Stalin intended to use the resulting doctors’ trial to launch a massive party purge. (Wikipedia on Joseph Stalin)

At a museum during winter break, two little boys were talking. One said, “the birds, they used to be dinosaurs!” The other angrily answered, “no, evolution isn’t real!”

Freedom is the freedom to look at the world and say, this is what I see. It is the freedom to report truly what one finds without fear of repercussion. Freedom means that if a survey shows left-handed people die younger (I make no claim as to whether or not it is a true result), then people have the freedom to say, here’s what I did, and here were the results.

Freedom means that if the fossil record shows intermediate stages between reptiles and birds, then we are free to say that. We don’t have to worry about how it interacts with the Bible or with other religious texts. That’s something you do in tyrant-ruled countries, you worry about offending the ruler. If Stalin came up with a fake plot to make Jews look bad, people couldn’t say, oh you made that up. If they said that, even though it’s true, Stalin would have them killed. You had to say false things just because Stalin wanted you to say them.

But if you have freedom, you can say anything so long as it is true .And you can probably say a great many false things too. If Galileo looks in his telescope and finds moons around Jupiter, he should be able to say so. If the Earth goes around the sun, he should be able to say so, even if Psalms 104:5 says “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” But he was called to Rome to stand trial, and Wikipedia reports that the church, the 17th-century Stalin, decided “Galileo was found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’, namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to ‘abjure, curse, and detest’ those opinions.”

But he was right! He was saying correct things, and the church wanted him to “abjure, curse, and detest” the true things he was saying, simply because it was declared “contrary to Holy Scripture”.

Today, parents across the country favor teaching creationism alongside evolution, or else supplanting it entirely. If you ask them, what would it take to convince you that evolution is true? They will answer, you can never convince me.

But if there is no way to ever convince someone, then they can’t be interested in looking for the truth. If you’re interested in believing what is true, there is always some way to convince you.

What would it take to convince me that water is three parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, instead of two? Well, if I measured the mass of hydrogen very carefully, and the mass of oxygen, and then split water into hydrogen and oxygen and measured the mass of each, I’d then use those numbers to calculate how much hydrogen and how much oxygen there was. If there really was three times as much hydrogen, then I’d talk to my peers and ask them what their results were. And if most of them had H3O as well, and I asked my teacher, and my teacher said it had always been H3O, I would then go to my textbook. I remember it saying H2O. But then, my textbook says H3O as well, and so do all my old books at home, and then I go to Wikipedia, and it is H3O there as well. At this point, that it’s an elaborate hoax becomes less and less likely. Because I remember H2O from so many years ago, I would still be highly skeptical. I go home and do the experiment again with my own equipment. I ask other scientists. Eventually, I change my mind and believe that water is really H3O. Later, my sister comes to me and asks me, what is water? And I answer, H3O. People know I really believe it because I wouldn’t intentionally lie to my sister about such a thing.

What would it take to convince me that left-handed people die sooner? If we collected information on the lives of many many people, including what handed-ness they were, and sorted them into groups with similar lifestyles, and looked at each group, and in an overwhelming majority of the groups, the left-handed people died earlier than their right-handed peers, then the more people we’d studied, the more I’d believe it.

What would it take to convince me that there really was a god? First, I’d have to know what is meant by a god. I’m then told that a god is an all-knowing being. If I go walking and see god on a hill, or I hear a voice saying that it is god, I might think that I was dreaming or hallucinating. But then, suppose the voice tells me that the Yale libraries have 20,001 books in it (I don’t know how many there actually are), and then I went and counted the books afterwards, and it was actually correct. I then suspect a friend (who knew how many books were in the Yale libraries) had pretended to be God. But then, I go somewhere else so that I’m not around the same people anymore, and I leave my phone at home, and go for another walk. The voice comes back and tells me exactly how much the music store’s best violin is worth. If enough verifiable events like this occurred, then I would begin to consider that there is an intelligent entity that knows a lot more than me.

I once told my high school physics teacher that if the amount of matter in the universe were precisely the right amount such that the limit of the universe’s spatial size was a constant, then I’d consider more seriously the existence of a god-figure. There are three possible fates for the universe. One is to keep expanding forever until all matter was just isolated particles, all alone in space. This universe gets bigger and bigger, and there is no limit on its size. A second is that eventually, things stop expanding, and then gravity takes hold. Things come speeding back together and end in a big crunch. The third is that the universe keeps expanding, but slower and slower, so that although it never stops expanding, it never gets bigger than a certain size either. But for this bounded universe to be true, there has to be precisely the correct amount of matter, and a single electron too many will (in countless billions of years) bring everything crashing together.

What would it take to convince a person that evolution is true? The answer can’t be “you’ll never convince me”. It can’t be “the Bible is good enough for me”. That would mean that they are getting their beliefs entirely from an antique volume, written by faded men. It would mean they are simply not looking at the world; not caring whether their beliefs match the world around them.

First, Casey Brown testified that following her opposition to the curriculum change on October 18, 2004, Buckingham called her an atheist and Bonsell told her that she would go to hell. Second, Angie Yingling was coerced into voting for the curriculum change by Board members accusing her of being an atheist and un-Christian. In addition, both Bryan Rehm and Fred Callahan have been confronted in similarly hostile ways, as have teachers in the DASD.

The strange thing about the world is, you can coerce people into saying things they don’t believe or believing things that don’t work in the world. But what you can’t do is coerce the world to do something false, no matter how hard you try. You can fabricate data and misrepresent data; you can argue and protest that the Earth shouldn’t be 4.6 billion years old, and animals shouldn’t evolve, because the Bible says so. It doesn’t matter. The Bible can’t control the Earth. Animals change, uncaring about the objections of humans. You can draw up big fancy charts showing the universe spinning round with Earth at its center. Scour your Bible and draw together every quote there is about a firmly-fixed Earth. It doesn’t matter. When you want to send a space probe to Saturn, it still won’t work.

Don’t, don’t try to match the world to an ancient book. Instead, match one’s beliefs to the world. Look at the world, and don’t decide what is true beforehand. Don’t think, I’ll accept the results of this experiment only if they agree with the Bible. The experiment gives the results it does, and even if the Bible doesn’t like it, those are the results you get. And if it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that Jesus was born of a mortal man, would you be curious, or dismayed? Would you be interested in reading the paper? The answer should be yes, because if that is what really happened, not reading the paper won’t change it. Holding on to a belief doesn’t make it any more true.

Rather than futilely insisting upon a particular favored belief, let’s give ourselves the freedom to believe what is true.

In 2004, the Dover area school district had one high school, the Dover Area High school. It had a school board of nine members. By 2002, two of the members were William Buckingham and Alan Bonsell, two young-earth creationists.

In 2004, Buckingham protested to Biology, Dover Area High School’s biology textbook, written by Kenneth R. Miller (not the same as Kenneth P. Miller, known for testifying against gays in Perry v. Schwarzenegger). He said it was “laced with Darwinism”. On October 18th, the school board voted 6-3 to required teachers to read a statement to biology students, which is reproduced here.

So the world is interesting and full of interesting things I want to blog about, but because those tend to become very long, involved entries, I tend to not-get-around-to-it during the week.

Therefore, I’m publicly committing to go through with the intended short sequence. It is only two days, so not a huge commitment to be starting off on, so hopefully the chances of it actually happening are a bit higher. Tomorrow and the day after should be interesting entries. If they aren’t, then I’m very publicly and very blatantly unreliable, and I shall be embarrassed about it.

If that goes well, then I will launch into a week-long sequence, in which each day will be heartbreaking. If not, I’ll have to regroup a bit, write a few more dinky posts, and then try again. (No, that’s totally not true. If I fail spectacularly and things go badly, I’ll try the week-long sequence anyways.)

This actually feels like a lot more of a commitment than simply writing a blog entry each day. Always before, I knew I could generate a hundred words in a small handful of minutes. Monkeys on weblogs.

I’d heard vaguely of SOPA referenced here and there, but my first real run-in with it was when I tried to access Wikipedia, and found it blacked out in protest.

That was when I decided SOPA was SERIOUS BUSINESS (because things on the Internets are SERIOUS BUSINESS). It’s a bill currently being debated in the House of Representatives. A bit of running about the Internets turned up a great many explanations of the form:

The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws. The Attorney General could also bar search engines from displaying links to the sites.
The bill also establishes a two-step process for intellectual property rights holders to seek relief if they have been harmed by a site dedicated to infringement. The rights holder must first notify, in writing, related payment facilitators and ad networks of the identity of the website, who, in turn, must then forward that notification and suspend services to that identified website, unless that site provides a counter notification explaining how it is not in violation. The rights holder can then sue for limited injunctive relief against the site operator, if such a counter notification is provided, or if the payment or advertising services fail to suspend service in the absence of a counter notification. ((Google-cached) Wikipedia)

and

The bills would give the Justice Department the power to go after foreign websites willfully committing or facilitating intellectual property theft — “rogue” sites like The Pirate Bay. The government would be able to force U.S.-based companies, like Internet service providers, credit card companies and online advertisers, to cut off ties with those sites. (CBS News)

and suchlike. Eventually, I became cross and confused, and accosted Pesto over Gchat, which turned out this interesting little exchange (edited only for capitalization, punctuation, and one typo):

(Pesto’s writing is always near-perfect, and all but one of the edits had to be in my (much shorter) portions of it.) So I thought about it a bit, and then I came to this conclusion:

I was speaking hypothetically. I doubt anyone would be interested in taking down my blog of rants. But suppose someone really dislikes my blog. (Maybe they don’t like polyamory, or maybe I’m going to hell because I think church is stupid.) So they complain to Xanga, and they say, that dragon in the background? I drew that, and wobster109 is copyright-infringing upon it!

Under the old system, I’d have a day’s time to remove it. In this case, I’d be skeptical that this person actually owns the dragon image, and I’d refuse. Then we’d get into a legal battle, and in the end it would be decided what I’m to do about it.

Under SOPA, I don’t even know if I hear about it. Xanga is immediately required to take down my page, and Google must stop turning it up in any searches, and then I have to file a counter notification. It seems (from the Google cache of Wikipedia) that Pesto’s aforementioned measure to prevent this is for the accused site to file a counter notification. And then we get into a legal battle. All the while, my blog stays down, until the thing is resolved.

And then, I’m very cross, and I Google my opponent, and I find that (s)he has a church site or something. Because I’m already cross, I quickly convince myself that getting this church site taken down will be a net benefit to the world, and then I file a counterclaim.

This is sounding like something I’m not very happy about. How will a site survive if it is down for the time of a legal battle? How long will they take to resolve once challenges start appearing?

I’m sick again! Right when it starts to clear up, I wake up one morning with a sore throat, and then a couple days later I’m sleeping all the time, and I have the sniffles, and a couple days after that I have a cough again. I’m really becoming cross with all this. I’ve been sick since November, and I don’t care to be sick anymore.

So I go on the internet, and I come across this lovely little comment (which is presented here urtext):
people who are afraid to die are afraid to live.  embrace life!  death is already certain.  make the most of life!

Now what the FSM is that even supposed to mean? And why do we have this vague notion that people who fear death can’t lead fulfilling lives? Why does this sort of thing sound perfectly reasonable to so many people?

. . . I’m being unfairly cross. I understand the sentiment, which is that you can’t be so paralyzed by caution that you never have any adventures. It was presented as an answer to someone’s post about fearing death. But not everyone who fears death is paralyzed by caution, and saying “people who are afraid to die are afraid to live” is hardly an answer. It’s not going to make anyone less afraid. Maybe I’m more afraid than average, because I look at a comment like that, and I want to shake my head and say, you’re answering an altogether different question.

A few days ago, I asked Mr. Grand High Ruszcyk for an “office hours appointment”, which was actually an online chat. He asked what was on my mind, and I said that I’d suddenly looked around one day and realized I’d turned into a Big Scary Adult. He said that was hard to believe. I protested, insisting that I am indeed big and scary. He said that wasn’t the part he was objecting to.

It’s only been one week of school. Just one itteh-bitteh week! But on Friday, during a meeting with a professor who is likely to become my senior project advisor, I was having a hard time staying focused and staying awake, and I really wanted to curl up in a squishy chair and take a nap. But somehow, it’s magically a lot easier to stay awake while playing dinky computer games.

In the wee hours of the morning (shortly before 5:00, I think), I finally decided enough with computer games, and sat down to knit a little. I fell asleep within two rows (and realized when I woke up that I’d made a mistake). I kept dreaming that I was looking for something and going back to my room to get it and then going into an abandoned building. It felt like all the world was unstable and I couldn’t even make any good guess what tomorrow would bring. Sometimes, I’d be mostly asleep but very slightly awake, and I’d realize that I was dreaming, and then I would try to wake up, but each time I tried I ended up in another dream instead. It was like flipping a coin atop a very narrow barrier, and I kept on trying, hoping that it would land on the awake side of the barrier. Each time, I suspected I was still asleep and tried to wake up again. Eventually, I stopped because I thought I was awake, but I actually wasn’t.

I woke up for real. It was 19:00. The world was already dark outside. I’d slept through every single daylight hour.

I’m supposed to find a job and do a senior project and put together an IMC team. All this stuff needs to be done by someone who sleeps through every single daylight hour in a day.

I spent the night playing computer games and watching Lord of the Rings. It’s really hard to feel like an adult right now! It’s hard to imagine being responsible, or having a job with a regular schedule, or one day spawning, or being responsible for supporting regular-scheduled spawn with a regular-scheduled job. It’s hard to imagine being a Responsible Adult when I’ve slept until night and then played a lot of computer games. This isn’t what Real People do! A Real Person would probably wake up in the morning, eat regular meals, and do productive things.

The strange thing about sleeping until night is that when I wake up, all I feel like doing is going back to bed.

How does the world manage? How do actually-responsible people manage?

And now it’s 5:00 again. I don’t think I’ve made it to a single brunch this year, except for the one on Putnam day. Maybe I’ll wake up in time for brunch tomorrow, which goes until 13:30. More likely I’ll wake up just as the sun is setting.

I’m not going to play any more computer games for a while. I said that last time, and it lasted all of two days. But this time I mean it. Tomorrow, I’ll just sit somewhere and knit and read and not play any computer games.

During dinner with Rachel and Alex at York Street Noodle, there was a TV turned to the Ms. America pageant. We were right at the interesting part too, the talent show followed by the questions. Several of the contestants were dancers. There were two ballerinas, an Irish tapdancer, and a contemporary dancer. Another several were singers, and most of them were remarkably good singers. One was a pianist. I felt she was not a very good pianist. She hunched over the keys in a way that would’ve made it very hard to play anything powerful.

Next was the short question round. There was a question about whether Ms. America should be allowed to declare political affiliation, and a question about the government and child obesity, and another about celebrities and religion. Ms. New York got a question about Occupy Wall Street. She said that the protesters should propose actual changes they wanted implemented. I was fond of her answer because it felt like an actual opinion she was expressing.

I’d like there to be an equivalent Mr. America thing. That would be funny to watch, I think.

Polyamory is the gender-neutral version of polygamy. Polygamy refers to a male having multiple wives, while polyamory refers to people (of any gender) having multiple spouses.

Now, something I hear over and over again is “if gay marriage becomes legal, then polygamy will become legal too!” (I imagine the speaker means polyamory, so I’ll treat it as such.) This is upsetting to me for a number of reasons, and the first is that gay marriage is nothing like polyamory. It is akin to saying if we can cure measles, then we’ll be able to cure every other illness too. Gay marriage simply means that the genders of the two people being married is no longer a constraint. The large body of legal benefits from marriage remain unchanged. It’s not any different adding another person to one’s insurance plan if that person is the same or a different gender.

Polyamory would complicate legal issues a bit. For example, an insurance plan would probably not be very happy to have unlimited spouses added to a person’s plan. Let’s put that aside for now. We will return to it later.

When people say something like “if gay marriage becomes legal, then polyamory will become legal too”, what do they mean? It seems to me they mean roughly the same thing as “if gay marriage becomes legal, then next we’ll be marrying our dogs”, that is, polyamory being legal is highly undesirable to them. Ask, why is polyamory undesirable? And you might get the answer, because it will complicate some legal structure or other.

Is this the reason the person objects to polyamory, or is it the justification? To put it another way, will the person answer this way immediately, or will they think for a moment and then come up with this answer? If you ask an opponent of abortion why they oppose abortion, they will likely answer right away, saying that they believe the fetus is a human life, without hesitation. Chances are, that is the real reason they oppose abortion. If you ask a person why polyamory is undesirable, it’s less likely that they actually care very deeply about the trouble it will cause to insurance companies.

If fetuses were proven to not be people, would abortion opponents still oppose abortion? Probably not. If implementing polyamory were very convenient for the government and for insurance companies, would polyamory opponents still oppose polyamory? Probably.

I believe the reason people object to polyamory is because they think it is evil. This is (I believe) a false but understandable view. Historically, polyamory was much to the detriment of women. A biblical story (Genesis 29?) tells of Jacob working seven years for Laban, being deceived into marrying Leah, and working another seven years to marry Rachel. Regardless of whether this story is true, it shows that such a thing was accepted (and probably common) at the time. Assuming a year’s work to be worth $50,000 in current U.S. dollars, that places the value of a woman at around $350,000. For $350,000, one could buy and own a person.

Even today, we hear stories from time to time of cult leaders keeping multiple wives, often adolescent girls, and impregnating them.

However, all polyamory is not all like this. A group of people who all are of sound mind, who can all leave a union any time they wish, and who all mutually consent to the arrangement could be a very different situation entirely.

I believe that something is bad in some way if someone is being harmed by it. Some people believe things are bad if they are against what they believe to be the intentions of their deity. However, each person has the freedom of religion. This has two major components: the freedom to believe whatever one chooses, and the protection from the beliefs of others. This means that I have a right to believe prayers must be said on Sundays, but not the right to force my neighbor to pray on Sundays. I have the right to believe homosexuality is immoral, but not the right to prevent my neighbors from marrying whomever they choose. The former part is well-known by all; the latter is overlooked by many.

Anyone has the right to believe polyamory is immoral. The question is, do any of those reasons fall outside personal belief?

Well, we could argue that it would complicate the legal benefits of marriage. That makes it legally inconvenient, but not immoral. Adoption is legally inconvenient, but very very moral. We could also argue that it oppresses women. But that is false if all persons involve are fully informed and make the informed choice themselves. We could argue that children raised in those families are worse off than children raised in traditional families. Such an argument would require sound evidence, and if anyone has sound evidence, I’d be happy to see it.

As of now, I have seen no evidence that consensual, fully-informed polyamory harms anyone. People who would choose it for themselves may benefit from it. If it were legally convenient to implement, I would see that as a great thing.

I believe everything should be permitted unless someone is harmed by it.

This is not to say that I want every relationship to be a polyamorous one, no more than legalizing gay marriage would require every marriage to be homosexual. If one does not want to be involved in polyamory, one has every right to say that to one’s significant other and refuse to be in a relationship or marriage otherwise. But it’s too unfair to say, because I don’t want that, it’s a horribly evil thing that is the paragon of evil, and when I think something else is very bad I compare it to polyamory because it is the most evil thing I can think of.

For certain there are legal inconveniences today that make legalizing polyamory more difficult than legalizing gay marriage, and also, public opinion is so overwhelmingly against polyamory. Are the legal issues solvable? Maybe. Perhaps each person can have a list of people whom they want to be able to visit them in hospitals, or perhaps insurance companies can set an amount for (non-children members of) a person’s family. Perhaps marriage can be entirely divorced from secular law and left up to people to work out for themselves.

I do self-identify as a polyamorist. I’ve tried very hard to become bisexual, and I’m still trying. I began with the same cultural background as anyone else, hearing about polyamory in unsavory contexts and seeing it as a bad thing. Polyamory, for me, unlike sexual orientation, is a choice. No amount of reasoning can make me attracted to someone I’m not attracted to, but a little bit of thinking over a few years can make me a polyamorist.

Enough theorizing about morality and the freedoms of individuals. I personally am a polyamorist because I don’t believe loving someone else means loving the first person less, and I don’t believe physical involvement is a proxy for romantic feelings. Prevalent among our beliefs is this idea that sex is a proxy for romantic feeling. If one sleeps with someone else, then they must feel romantically about that person, and they must feel less strongly for their originally partner then. But I don’t think this is actually the way every single person has to be. I think some people could very well love multiple people in profoundly meaningful and romantic ways.

This does not mean that I want to have many sexual partners. This does not mean that I insist on having multiple romantic partners regardless of how Discord feels about it. It means that in any relationship I become involved in, the other person knows that they are free to date other people (of any gender) other than myself, and to do anything (safely) with them, and I will not become bothered by it. I encourage them to become involved with other people if they wish to. (I do insist that the other person be fully informed so that they can choose whether to become involved.) If I am not involved with anyone and a married person approaches me, I see no reason not to become involved with that person so long as the spouse(s) and all other partners are ok with it. If I am involved with someone, I will become open to dating other people if my significant other tells me that (s)he is fine with it.

Declaring oneself a polyamorist doesn’t give oneself the clearance to have multiple partners; it gives one’s significant other(s) the clearance. One can personally not be interested in dating multiple people and still give one’s significant other clearance. It’s a lot like Crocker’s Rules, really.