I think it’s probably the future of relationships, just because most non-religious people can’t produce a coherent case for monogamy except “think of the children”, and most people will very reasonably say “well, I’m not planning on having children for a while so I’ll be poly for now”. It also seems like nonstandard relationships getting more accepted is a trend (gays, interracial marriage, etc) so I guess I should bet on the trend continuing. I’m not sure there’s a real dichotomy between “genuinely in love with many people” and “wants to be promiscuous”. For example, I became poly because my girlfriend at the time was poly and it would have been weird to have a mono person in a relationship with a poly person. Then I continued because why not.

Any spam comments on Unsong are to be interpreted as part of the text and mined for hidden wisdom.

After thinking about this a lot, I think maybe I would choose some autobiography of a poor person (or maybe a very realistic novel about a poor person) in order to make people more aware of and upset about poverty, and how difficult it is, and how it’s more complicated than most people think.

I don’t know what books are available in this class (it makes me feel really sad and angry and hopeless to read these and so I avoid them) but if I had the power to make everyone read one book, I guess I would start looking for which ones were good.

I think it might also be a First World poverty book, just because I don’t think Third World poverty can be easily solved by people feeling nice and wanting to solve it, so I’m not sure what I would do in that direction.

Other possibilities and why I reject them:
1. The Life You Can Save or some other book on effective altruism. This is a strong contender, but given that lots of people know about EA and reject it, I predict that most people would be kind of bored and say it sounded autistic or something, or say they were totally in favor and then give to the Cute Puppy charity anyway because they’re dumb and good at convincing themselves that’s most effective.

2. The LW Sequences book. Same reason as above - I think most people wouldn’t appreciate it. I might choose this one if I were just choosing things for fun and not for Making A Difference.

3. One of David Friedman’s good Economic Literacy 101 books. But I think probably most people who are economically illiterate wouldn’t understand it no matter how 101 it was, plus a lot of people will just dismiss it as Capitalist Propaganda anyway. I feel like these ideas are already out there enough for anyone who’s open to them.

4. PIHKAL or some other good psychedelics-related book in order to get people more on board with psychedelic research. Probably not a bad idea, but I think less high-value than poverty.

I guess I just don’t think most people are very good at being influenced by nonfiction books or taking them seriously. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin supposedly started the Civil War, so good look-how-horrible-things-are fiction seems to be able to move people pretty effectively.

I would say Mormonism, because it doesn’t count if it’s not in a community, and Utah seems nicer than Dearborn Heights.

Also, a couple of rationalists legitimately converted to Mormonism and it went exactly as well as they hoped, so that’s a proof-of-concept that I haven’t seen with Islamic conversion.

Also, realistically there’s like a 5% chance it’s going to stick, and I understand Muslims get kind of angry when you deconvert.

I’m fine with people spending their own money on crazy projects, and I think it’s pretty cool. I’m not sure I’d want the money that’s supposed to be used to cure cancer going to that.

If by “harmful” you mean “it will make them really upset”, and by “naturally monogamous people” you mean “people who get really upset by polyamory”, well, there’s your answer.

I’m not sure how else to define those terms so I’m not really sure what you mean.

Fun fact - clinical depression used to be called “melancholia”, but that was (became?) the vernacular for normal sadness. So they changed it to “depression” in order to make it sound more like a separate disease, and then the vernacular shifted to call normal sadness “depression”.

I think this is like the thing where any word meaning “not metaphorically” ends up as a generic intensifier that can be applied to metaphors. We’re seeing it now with “literally”, but it happened before with “really”, “truly”, and even “very” which used to be related to “verily” eg truthfully, actually.

Also, at some point psychiatrists started using “melancholia” again to mean a super-severe form of depression that nobody could ever confuse with ordinary sadness. I don’t know. People are weird.

So that was *kind of* joking, and I don’t know anything about foreign policy, and this is probably the worst idea ever, but here goes:

Iran is a (partial) democracy with much more liberal values than Saudi Arabia, which is a horrifying authoritarian hellhole. Iran has some level of women’s rights, some level of free speech, and a real free-ish economy that produces things other than oil. If they weren’t a theocracy, it would be hard to tell them apart from an average European state.

In the whole religious war thing, the Iranians are allied with the Shia and the Saudis with the Sunni. Most of our enemies in the Middle East are Sunni. Saddam was Sunni. Al Qaeda is Sunni. ISIS is Sunni. Our Iraqi puppet government is Shia, which is awkward because even though they’re supposed to be our puppet government they like Iran more than us. Bashar al-Assad is Shia, which is awkward because as horrible as he is he kept the country at peace, plus whenever we give people weapons to overthrow him they turn out to have been Al Qaeda in disguise.

Telling the Saudis to fuck off and allying with Iran would end this awkward problem where our friends are allies with our enemies but hate our other friends. I think it would go something like this:

- We, Russia, and Iran all cooperate to end the Syrian civil war quickly in favor of Assad, then tell Assad to be less of a jerk (which he’ll listen to, since being a jerk got him into this mess)

- Iraq’s puppet government doesn’t have to keep vacillating between being a puppet of us and being a puppet of Iran. They can just be a full-time puppet of the US-Iranian alliance. Us, Iran, Iraq, and Syria all ally to take out ISIS.

- We give Iran something they want (like maybe not propping up Saudi Arabia) in exchange for them promising to harass Israel through legal means rather than violence. Iran either feels less need to develop nuclear weapons, or else maybe they have nuclear weapons but they’re on our side now so it’s okay.

- The Saudi king was visibly shaken and dropped his copy of Kitab al-Tawhid. The Arabs applauded and accepted Zoroaster as their lord and savior. A simurgh named “Neo-Achaemenid Empire” flew into the room and perched atop the Iranian flag. The Behistun Inscription was read several times, and Saoshyant himself showed up and enacted the Charter of Cyrus across the region. The al-Saud family lost their crown and were exiled the next day. They were taken out by Mossad and tossed into the pit of Angra Mainyu for all eternity.

PS: Marg bar shaytân-e bozorg

I think you’re right to ask “Is there a sense?”

That is, the naive answer is like the story of the economists in the bar. Bill Gates walks in, and the economists start dancing and cheering, shouting “Hooray! On average, everyone in this bar is really rich right now!”

A lot of worries about immigration sound kind of like economists in a bar, and then a homeless guy walks in, and then they start crying and sobbing because now on average the people in the bar are poorer.

I think there are some people kind of developing the intellectual work it would take to be more sophisticated than this - like Garett Jones - but I’m not convinced that actual immigration opponents have read them or are familiar with them.

Man, I don’t know. I think during that scene I was thinking that I would leave without the watch, then have a friend get it a few weeks later and mail it to me. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but cop-out answers are all I’ve got.

But if I did, I definitely wouldn’t stay around to make Pop-Tarts.