29 KiB
[RST][BST][WIP][HSF] Is Marriage Spiders?
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Author: u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3ihfoy/rstbstwiphsf_is_marriage_spiders/
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Score: 5
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Created: 2015-08-26T16:31:12
Post:
A possible omake for "S.I." (unless I include it wholesale):
"And what," asked the black-and-cyan spider-woman, pausing mid-sentence to take a sip from her champagne flute - with no sign that any of the alcohol was making it through her centauroid body to her distended, transparent, fluid-filled abdomen, "have you been doing most recently, Your Highness?"
"There are so many ways to answer that," Queen Bunny replied, taking a sip of her own private stock of filtered water, "but one of the pithier answers is: redefining marriage."
"Ah, an old royal tradition; your ancestor Henry the Eighth did something similar, did he not?"
"He was more of a cousin than an ancestor, and my reasons have more to do with a certain aspect of politics than with who I want to bed. In fact, the latter is a large part of the problem I wish to solve."
"You want to solve... marriage." The party-guest raised a teal eyebrow.
Bunny waved a hand. "Yes, yes, I know - people are complicated." ( https://xkcd.com/592/ ) "That's not the problem. I recently went through some intelligence reports on certain politicians, and the number of them whose illicit affairs interfered with them doing their jobs was... excessive. Frankly, I don't care who sleeps with who - but if someone I'm going to have to rely on is going to be susceptible to blackmail because of it, and I can see it coming, then I should take at least basic measures to head the issue off before it becomes an issue."
"And how, pray tell, will redefining marriage solve something that humanity has been dealing with since, well, before there was even a single humanity?"
"I haven't firmly settled on a solution, but I see at least two prongs to start with. One - one of the most important decisions a government can make are deciding which contracts should /not/ be enforced. If there is some law that, say, twenty percent of people routinely violate, then it's a bad law. So I'd like to get whatever states I head even further out of the bedrooms than they already are. And second to that, I'm looking into using the term 'households' instead of 'marriages', at least for tax and records-keeping purposes, with no moral implications involved about who is a member of a household. Two brothers attending university and splitting rent could be as much of a household as a classic marriage. I'm working through some of the complications - differentiating between household members who can, at least in theory, leave to live on their own, and those who are dependent; multiple households under a single roof, or a single family with multiple homes; and so on... but overall, the approach looks promising. That said, if anyone here can suggest a different approach with an even better ratio of pros to cons, I'd be quite happy to lend whatever moral authority I have to that, instead."
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+15] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
If there is some law that, say, twenty percent of people routinely violate, then it's a bad law.
First off, completely disagree with this. If 20% of people litter, a law against littering is a bad one? If 20% of people use their cellphone while driving, having a law against it is bad? If 20% of people routinely violate a law, that says something about what incentives are in place; poor enforcement of the law is the primary culprit, whether that's because of apathy on the part of those who enforce the laws or an inability to enforce the law effectively (due to time or budget). "Everybody does it" is not a good argument and it becomes even less good of an argument when you pare it down to a smaller set than "everybody".
Second, there are a few reasons that marriage exists, but I think we can (for the moment) ignore the cultural/inertial/religious ones. If we're just talking about what the government's role should be then marriage exists because marriage as an institution is good for society. Mostly this has to do with children; a child raised by a single parent has worse outcomes, even when correcting for socioeconomic background, so it's good for society if we do something to ensure that children have more than one parent (research is sparse on plural parentage). So if you want to say "two brothers deserved the same tax breaks you would give a married couple" I think you need some data to justify that in some way. Is it better for society that those two are living together? I don't know the answer to that question; it's a question that you would want to solve with research rather than just making a guess or trying to use your imagination.
Of course, governments go about this inefficiently, because they're governments. Also because in most places in the world, governments are more responsive to people than actual outcomes. Plus institutional inertia.
u/None [+3] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
It seems to me as though "don't get caught breaking this law" is how all laws work.
u/None [+5] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
So your argument is:
- A law against something some significant minority of people do (such as littering) would be impossible to enforce consistently.
- Because it is impossible to enforce consistently, it would be enforced selectively.
- Selective enforcement gives too much power to the enforcer.
- An enforcer with too much power would abuse it in ways detrimental to society.
I personally think selective enforcement is just how policing works and that not only is this inevitable, it's also beneficial in the face of limited resources and individual circumstances. If you have a problem with police officers using selective enforcement in a biased way, the problem isn't with selective enforcement, it's with the bias; removing selective enforcement (if such a thing were even possible) without removing the biases is just going to leave you with the same problem you had before.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
I'd say that selective enforcement is inevitable, but fair selective enforcement, while a hard problem, is one we already need to solve. As someone who lives in the United States, I'd rather get away from police as an enforcement mechanism and decommission the police altogether.
Portland, Oregon based group Rose City Copwatch assembled a collection of alternatives to having a police force. Most of them only partially address the relevant problems, but taken together, they would greatly reduce the need for a police force.
That's getting a little off topic, but it's still relevant.
u/PlaneOfInfiniteCats [+3] (18 hours later)
It seems to me that you and most other people in this thread approach the problem of selective enforcement qualitatively. Either enforcement is selective, or it is not.
This is exactly the wrong approach. There is always some degree of selective enforcement, no matter the implementation. It doesn't mean all implementations are equal.
Some laws are much more prone to selective enforcement, like littering law. Others are less prone.
I agree that selective enforcement of any laws has bad consequences, as outlined by other posters. I think that reducing potential for selective enforcement by implementing policies that are less vulnerable to it is a good thing. Biases and problems that cannot be removed can often be reduced, and should be reduced.
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (3 hours later)
If 20% of people litter, a law against littering is a bad one?
Queen Bunny: "The law is a blunt instrument, a last resort for using the violence of the state. Attempting to modify large-scale behavioural patterns isn't what a criminal code is best at - there are other avenues a government can pursue for such social policies, to tweak the incentives people face. Turning twenty percent of the population into criminals has all sorts of downsides."
marriage exists because marriage as an institution is good for society. Mostly this has to do with children if you want to say "two brothers deserved the same tax breaks you would give a married couple" I think you need some data to justify that in some way.
Quoth the Queen: "Given that my goal with this proposal is to reduce blackmailable corruption among certain high-power groups, then as long as treating households as the fundamental unit of taxation instead of individuals doesn't cause significant harm, does it really matter if it doesn't create much economic benefit?"
Of course, governments go about this inefficiently
Queenly quotation: "The aspect that I'm spending the most time on right now is figuring out what the initial set of default assumptions would be. They could be modified in the light of experience after the policy is put in place, but I'm talking about things like when someone who moves in with someone else is considered to be part of the household, and so on. A lot of such details can be fudged by making it easy for the citizenry to file a notice with the government that they're joining or leaving a particular household, but the less such paperwork is required, the easier it will be to make it a popular policy that will help win votes for the legislators involved."
u/sir_pirriplin [+3] (4 hours later)
Given that my goal with this proposal is to reduce blackmailable corruption among certain high-power groups...
If that's the only goal, there is no need to change the definition of marriage across the entire society. Just change the rules for the politicians.
For example, they could get a "scandal insurance" as part of their compensation, but only if they disclose the scandal before taking office to a State Confessor, who is always sworn to secrecy.
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (5 hours later)
For example, they could get a "scandal insurance" as part of their compensation, but only if they disclose the scandal before taking office to a State Confessor, who is always sworn to secrecy.
QB: "That's very much the sort of idea I wanted to evoke by bringing up the topic: one I wouldn't have thought of myself. I'm not sure I'm quite clear on how this particular approach is supposed to work, though; wouldn't this State Confessor have to reveal whether or not a secret had been confessed to them, in order for this insurance to pay out? And in what circumstances would it pay out at all? Is there a way to avoid the obvious perverse incentives involved in leaking one's own secrets?"
u/sir_pirriplin [+5] (8 hours later)
Wouldn't this State Confessor have to reveal whether or not a secret had been confessed to them, in order for this insurance to pay out?
If someone threatens to disclose a politician's secret, the politicians can just disclose it himself and collect lots of money as a consolation prize, but only if the secret was disclosed to the Confessor before.
If the politician does something illegal to appease his blackmailers and the government finds out, the Confessor is going to reveal the secret anyway. That means it's usually safer for the politician to just ignore the blackmailers, and if the blackmailers then release the secret, at least the insurance money will be a consolation prize.
Is there a way to avoid the obvious perverse incentives involved in leaking one's own secrets?
If politicians start disclosing their own secrets before someone else threatens to do it for them, all I can say is MISSION FUCKING ACCOMPLISHED.
u/DataPacRat [+3] Amateur Immortalist (9 hours later)
MISSION FUCKING ACCOMPLISHED.
Whether or not that's a reference to https://xkcd.com/810/ , :) .
QB: "Now, all I supposed I have to do is assemble a group of people who are demonstrably trustworthy enough to be these Confessors. ... Come to think of it, though, that's what I'm trying to create in the first place, so I'm suddenly wondering whether we're putting the cart before the horse here..."
u/xkcd_transcriber [+1] (9 hours later)
Title: Constructive
Title-text: And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 168 times, representing 0.2157% of referenced xkcds.
^xkcd.com ^| ^xkcd sub ^| ^Problems/Bugs? ^| ^Statistics ^| ^Stop Replying ^| ^Delete
u/sir_pirriplin [+1] (12 hours later)
You can be the Confessor at first. Then, as you find more trustworthy people (whose secrets you know, because you are their Confessor) they can become the Confessors of other politicians.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+3] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
Um. . . money is nice, but it isn't power. We are discussing people with capability and a drive to improve the world as they see it. I think the usual problems of calling the other guy stupid, has eroded our understanding of the balance between power, scandal wiping out paths to continuing power, and money (which is pretty much just a side effect and facilitator to power) balance in the mind of senior bureaucrats and politicians.
u/None [+1] (6 hours later)
Of course, governments go about this inefficiently, because they're governments.
This strikes me as one of those statements that may measure bounded-rational agents by the standards of resource-unbounded rationality.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
It's obvious that governments operate nowhere near bounded optimality.
u/Geminii27 [+2] (18 hours later)
As a whole, perhaps. Certain segments can be quite capable of operating much more efficiently than private-sector equivalents, as they are not restrained by the requirement to be profitable.
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+1] Nudist Beach (2 days later)
I don't know, it seems to me that they have something like a profit motive - they may not answer to market forces, but they still have to justify their existence to the guy who divvies out tax money.
u/Geminii27 [+2] (2 days later)
Not so much. Government departments tend to be created by acts of whichever party is in office, sometimes with cross-factional backing. They're dissolved the same way. The decision about whether to keep them going tends to be made at the top levels without much reference to whether they're justifying themselves economically.
As long as their actions are justifying them politically, or at least they're not so terrible that they're a significant and major concern for national-level politicians, they're not in much danger of being decommissioned or significantly altered. Their budget might be tinkered with, but that's not usually related to their past performance, but how much money is in the government kitty overall (and, to a degree, any political lobbying for/against them, but that's also not generally based on their performance).
u/None [+1] (20 hours later)
Can you specify their utility function, the one they believe they have, and demonstrate this?
Because, you know, the general point of a democratic government is to compromise between all the different, competing value functions trying to get expressed using public resources.
u/RMcD94 [+0] (a day later)
Uh I'm pretty sure you don't actually believe that the government's role is to maximise societal goodness, nor do I think you actually belive that the institution of marriage was implemented because or maintained because or even has any evidence supporting that it is good for society.
Your logic is pretty irrelevant since you can do it from the other direction as well, in particular how the current incarnation of marriage limits polygamy which is probably social good maximising, I say probably due to evolution but I could be wrong .
Also I am surprised you support marriage considering the mental construct I have for you.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
The core idea behind a modern, healthy marriage is the buddy system. It's easy to flounder alone, and having a second person means you have help recovering. People get bored alone, so you add another person to make things more fun. People get lonely, so we bring in other people for company.
There are good arguments to be made toward making such relationships more flexible and encouraging explicit negotiation rather than a single option conflating a bunch of aspects of a relationship. On the other hand, people tend to follow well-advertised routes, so it's good to have a limited number of prototypes for this relationship.
Regardless, the common tropes about heterosexual marriage today are crud. They also tend to be to women's detriment. Wives are referred to as a ball and chain (yeah, and I'm the handle; together we're a morning star, so don't mock us). Special wedding shoes exist -- for women, they often have "I" written on one sole and "do" on the other; for men, it's "save" and "me". Cake toppers feature women dragging men who are trying desperately to crawl away. That's not healthy.
Marriage is helpful for a man's career. It indicates to a boss that a man is at a relatively stable point of life, which means he's less likely to leave the company. For a woman's career, it's a detriment: it's a risk factor for pregnancy, and bosses expect women to take extra time in parental leave. They expect women to spend more time on childcare and be less available and have less energy for their job. That means married women are less likely to be hired or promoted, which means married men get paid more on average, which means if anyone in a heterosexual marriage needs to take unpaid leave or quit their job, it's the wife rather than the husband. (And this is on top of wage discrimination.) Vicious cycle.
Fidelity is assumed, but more so for women than for men. This is changing slowly -- the media I have consumed suggests that it was pretty much expected and accepted for reasonably wealthy men to have a mistress in the 1700s, but today less so.
There's a lot more that's problematic in marriage, but if I bring it up, I'm in for quite a bit of argument, and it'll be my facts and figures which I must laboriously hunt down versus insinuations and cultural stereotypes that take no effort to spew forth. That's exhausting, and I'm ill today.
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (4 hours later)
The core idea behind a modern, healthy marriage is the buddy system. It's easy to flounder alone, and having a second person means you have help recovering. People get bored alone, so you add another person to make things more fun. People get lonely, so we bring in other people for company.
QB: "And those are all aspects of marriage that I want to preserve, which is why I'm trying to craft this 'household' system as a drop-in replacement for the civil aspects of marrying."
Fidelity is assumed, but more so for women than for men. it was pretty much expected and accepted for reasonably wealthy men to have a mistress in the 1700s, but today less so.
QB: "It's the fact that mistresses - or, more rarely, the opposite-sex equivalent - are both still so widespread but now so disparaged that leads to the whole blackmail issue. Decriminalizing the breaking of monogamous marriage oaths plus tweaking the tax system, by setting the base unit as 'households', to tweak the incentives faced by men who would otherwise cheat on their legal spouse is the closest I've been able to think of to a minimal-downside social policy."
There's a lot more that's problematic in marriage
QB: "If it helps, I'm just trying to focus specifically on creating more-trustworthy ministers and advisors, without causing any significant downsides in the process."
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
It's the fact that mistresses - or, more rarely, the opposite-sex equivalent - are both still so widespread but now so disparaged that leads to the whole blackmail issue. Decriminalizing the breaking of monogamous marriage oaths plus tweaking the tax system, by setting the base unit as 'households', to tweak the incentives faced by men who would otherwise cheat on their legal spouse is the closest I've been able to think of to a minimal-downside social policy.
Breaking the monogamous marriage oaths isn't criminal in most jurisdictions. It's a criminal act in 40% of the United States, most Muslim countries, and large swaths of Africa, but not other places. In the United States, those states in which it's illegal don't usually enforce it (but it stays on the books anyway, because no politician is going to go to bat for removing it - prosecution is dubiously legal following a series of Supreme Court cases anyway).
People still hate cheaters though; that's the real reason that blackmail is going to work. So long as a woman would divorce her wife over having an extramarital affair, there's going to be potential for blackmail. So long as a democratic society would refuse to vote for someone who had an extramarital affair, there's going to be blackmail.
And even if you have the government define "household" instead of "marriage", people are still going to get married, it's just that they'll do it on their own. There are a multitude of places where the government now just grants "civil partnership" but people in those places refer to their "husband" or "wife" instead of "civil partner".
Trying to change legal definitions isn't going to do much, if what you're worried about is blackmail.
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (5 hours later)
Trying to change legal definitions isn't going to do much, if what you're worried about is blackmail.
QB: "Blackmail and corruption. One of the classic ploys to neutralize a rip-roaring newcomer to a political scene is to get them involved in the smallest corrupting thing imaginable - maybe go to a party where there's someone under the drinking age with a glass of champagne. And then, step by step, integrate them into the existing political class. I'm hoping that removing 'infidelity' from the class of what can be considered 'just slightly worse than what the politician has done so far', it will at least take slightly longer to turn an honest statesman into a corrupt politician... and maybe even keep an otherwise-honest elected official with a taste for multiple partners from being dragged onto that road in the first place."
u/None [+0] (4 hours later)
It's the fact that mistresses - or, more rarely, the opposite-sex equivalent - are both still so widespread
Ah, so this society has far less infidelity among women? Your problem is much easier to solve! Only allow women to be ministers and advisors. It doesn't completely eliminate the problem, but it's a big improvement with little cost.
u/sir_pirriplin [+2] (4 hours later)
That's a fairly large cost. You lose half of potential applicants.
How about making it so only single people can be ministers? Is the amount of married people larger or smaller than the total amount of men?
You could even justify this saying ministers have to be 100% dedicated to their country so they nobly sacrifice their family life.
u/None [+0] (4 hours later)
Over 60% of people aged 35 and over are married. As long as you're firing people when they turn 30, your rule is marginally more efficient than mine.
I did that research for you. You could easily have looked up that information online.
u/None [+0] (7 hours later)
Regardless, the common tropes about heterosexual marriage today are crud. They also tend to be to women's detriment. Wives are referred to as a ball and chain (yeah, and I'm the handle; together we're a morning star, so don't mock us). Special wedding shoes exist -- for women, they often have "I" written on one sole and "do" on the other; for men, it's "save" and "me". Cake toppers feature women dragging men who are trying desperately to crawl away. That's not healthy.
Marriage is helpful for a man's career. It indicates to a boss that a man is at a relatively stable point of life, which means he's less likely to leave the company. For a woman's career, it's a detriment: it's a risk factor for pregnancy, and bosses expect women to take extra time in parental leave. They expect women to spend more time on childcare and be less available and have less energy for their job. That means married women are less likely to be hired or promoted, which means married men get paid more on average, which means if anyone in a heterosexual marriage needs to take unpaid leave or quit their job, it's the wife rather than the husband. (And this is on top of wage discrimination.) Vicious cycle.
Oh my fucking God non-feminists, get your goddamn shit together.
u/sir_pirriplin [+2] (3 hours later)
I think the "susceptibility to blackmail" sounds easier to change than the whole concept of marriage.
I don't actually know how to do it, but I know there already are some societies with marriage and politicians who aren't blackmailed, probably more than there are societies with no marriage at all.
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (3 hours later)
there already are some societies with marriage and politicians who aren't blackmailed
QB: "Which societies are those?"
u/sir_pirriplin [+3] (4 hours later)
Mine. One of our Presidents was a former Catholic priest who got into a sex "scandal" for having had sex with underage girls in the past. At least one of them got pregnant and had a son.
I put "scandal" in quotes because very few people cared. He was later impeached over an entirely different matter.
Then again, in my country politicians can get away with almost anything, which is obviously problematic and probably not something any society should aspire to imitate.
u/MugaSofer [+1] (a day later)
Where do you live?
u/sir_pirriplin [+1] (a day later)
I live in Paraguay.
The former President I mentioned is Fernando Lugo (president from 2008 to 2012) and he wasn't even that bad. Par for the course, really.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
You can remove the inclination toward infidelity, but that would be harder than changing marriage. You can remove the stigma of infidelity, but that's changing marriage. You can remove the inclination to blackmail people -- I'm not sure how, exactly, but maybe socialism would help. I doubt it would eliminate it, but it would at least reduce the frequency and the magnitude of possible gains.
u/DataPacRat [+1] Amateur Immortalist (5 hours later)
You can remove the stigma of infidelity, but that's changing marriage.
QB: "I'm pretty sure it's infeasible to remove the urge to have sex with multiple partners without doing horrible things to human neurodiversity; and, similarly, gaining profit - even if it's of a non-directly-monetary nature in a non-capitalist economy - from revealing secrets is pretty fundamental to human nature. Which leaves your second thought, which is what I'm toying with in the form of the household proposal."
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+2] (9 hours later)
Chesterton's Fence, motherfucker.
u/DataPacRat [+1] Amateur Immortalist (9 hours later)
QB: "That's why I've been coming up with a drop-in replacement for the present marriage laws instead of just wiping that slate clean entirely. And why I've been taking so long trying to fiddle the details on the initial roll-out."