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Eliezer Yudkowsky, profile picture

Reminder: While I'm sure _some_ users on Ashley Madison betrayed faithful spouses who thought their marriage was a sacred contract, it won't have been that way in all cases or even a supermajority of cases. I'm not just talking about explicitly recognized open marriages. In many kinds of "monogamous" marriage there are socially obligatory lies, expected and demanded by the listener, among people mostly driven by conventions who would be very unlikely to sit down and work out an exotic and unusual way to be honest with each other. So everyone in the Ashley Madison datadump remains innocent of actual ethical violations until proven guilty.

Yes, contracts are sacred to me, but a contract requires contractual capacity. Children are not committing betrayals when they lie to parents who hold all the cards and power, they are acting as their parents force them to act. If a police officer asks 'Do you know what speed you were going?' and you answer 'No' then you are hardly deceiving them or betraying the innocent trust that they held in you; you are responding to a governing system that has chosen to impose punishments for being naive enough and socially unskilled enough to tell the truth in a place where honesty and trust doesn't enter into it.

I don't really understand what a relationship looks like when there's all these things that people tacitly know and aren't supposed to admit, or when A knows B knows X but A doesn't know that B knows that A knows that B knows X. But I know that a whole lot of marriages were never built on innocent trust and sacred bargains to begin with... and that this is a normal state of affairs for human beings.

In particular, please don't go gloating over $EnemyX being revealed to have an Ashley Madison account, on pain of my rolling my eyes pretty hard especially when you start sanctimonizing about how very, very wrong cheating is in general.

Now if open relationships were openly considered normal and total sexual monogamy was a special commitment that had to be renewed every 3 years for a $100 fee, then the people signed up for Ashley Madison would indeed be much more evil on average. And there wouldn't be 28 million of them. A law that half the population disobeys isn't a law, it's a pretense hiding the real rules, and this is as true for marriage as marijuana.

Cristal Kelly, profile picture
Cristal Kelly
If only people weren't passive aggressive avoiders.
6 yrsMore
Cristal Kelly, profile picture
Cristal Kelly
And to be clear - cheating is not polyamory.
6 yrsMore
Paul Davis, profile picture
Paul Davis
Yah, well, way back in the 50's there was a swapping club that would meet at one of the local restaurants in Ohio County Kentucky and arrange who was sleeping with whom that weekend. Not that much of a "secret" if a seven year old kid found out about it.
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Jim Syler, profile picture
Jim Syler
I think I had an account before I was even *in* a relationship. Never did anything with it though.
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魁 リュウク, profile picture
魁 リュウク
Real talk!
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Jacob Carroll, profile picture
Jacob Carroll
I don't think Hermonie would agree with this.
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Jacob Carroll, profile picture
Jacob Carroll
I don't think Hermonie would agree with this post.
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Noah Cohen, profile picture
Noah Cohen
Needs harsher promised punishment to be moving. I still feel soapboxy.
6 yrsMore
Mirzhan Irkegulov, profile picture
Mirzhan Irkegulov
Fantastic article, yet I spent more than a minute trying to parse the first paragraph. Try to put the first paragraph in clarity calculator (http://www.infogineering.net/clarity-rating). Rule of thumb: break down long paragraphs, break down long sentences.
6 yrsMore
Patri Friedman, profile picture
Patri Friedman
Also some are saying that an email could be signed up without verification, though others are saying the isvalid field in the email db indicates whether it was verified. Either way, it seems fairly likely that the high-profile emails (ie Tony Blair) have a significant chance to be innocent. For example, president@whitehouse.gov, billclinton@whitehouse.gov, and hildabeast@whitehouse.gov (a mean name for Senator Clinton) are all listed, though with isvalid=0. It's a noisy data set, though one that seems like a turning point in the history of online privacy (ie there is no such thing without using anonymization technology).
6 yrsMore
Jade Q Wang, profile picture
Jade Q Wang
Agree with the gist of the overall point, but a minor nitpick. Does the 28M users include Canadian users? I think I remember a John Oliver segment where he mentioned the biggest hotspot for AM was actually Ottawa, in which case the denominator would be larger.
6 yrsMore
Rachel Palmer, profile picture
Rachel Palmer
I know people who are unfaithful to their spouses but get very jealous at the idea of their spouses sleeping with anyone else. Obviously polyamory would be unsuitable for them. I'm not sure what percentage of people who cheat are like this.
6 yrsMore
Leif K-Brooks, profile picture
Leif K-Brooks
You said that not *all* "monogamous" marriages are de facto open marriages. So how can someone tell whether their marriage is one without discussing it with their spouse? If it's impossible to tell, your position seems to require moral luck: if the spouse turns out to be ok with it after the fact, it wasn't an actual ethical violation; otherwise, it was.

Are you proposing between-the-lines communication? If so, how does this communication work, and how are you sure it exists?
6 yrsMore
Jonathan Jones, profile picture
Jonathan Jones
Let's talk about another kind of exclusivity contract: a musician signs an exclusivity contract with a record label. After what the record label believes are 10 productive years of producing great music and getting rich together the label discovers the musician has been moonlighting in beer halls and taverns playing unauthorised gigs and cutting the label out of their share of the profits. The label sues the musician and the judge awards damages. If the musician's defence is "there are socially obligatory lies, expected and demanded by the listener among people mostly driven by conventions who would be very unlikely to sit down and work out an exotic and unusual way to be honest with eachother" then the judge calls the musician a dick, and then he awards damages.

Yes, all marriages and relationships are different and have their own implicit clauses added to the contract, and in some there's a 'don't ask don't tell' attitude to infidelity. But you know if you're in that kind of marriage of relationship, and if you're not sure, you're probably not.
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Ben Sixsmith, profile picture
Ben Sixsmith
A moral law that people break need not be a bad moral law. It can mean that people are immoral.
6 yrsMore
Roy Stogner, profile picture
Roy Stogner
Does "A law that half the population disobeys isn't a law, it's a pretense hiding the real rules" also apply to "don't go gloating over $EnemyX being revealed to have an Ashley Madison account"?
6 yrsMore
Michael Vassilevsky, profile picture
Michael Vassilevsky
I can imagine a world in which this is true, in which people expect their partners to claim to be monogamous but don't really expect monogamy, and where don't-ask-don't-tell coexists alongside monogamy under the same name. But that's not the actual world, as evidenced by all the people who blow up when they discover their partner's infidelity. If it were just a matter of tacit knowledge becoming explicit, it would be strange for the reaction to be that extreme.
6 yrsMore
Emily Dempsey, profile picture
Emily Dempsey
Like, here is my understanding.

Consider a situation in which I am married but am, for whatever reason, interested in sex and/or romance with someone other than my spouse, and have the following options, which I honestly believe have a high likelihood of leading to certain outcomes.

1) I could remain faithful to my spouse. However, I fear that my resentment for not being able to pursue other relationship(s) will fester, hindering my ability to be a good spouse, and that eventually the marriage seems likely to fall apart.

2) I can communicate my exact situation and desires to my spouse. However, I fear that it will be too great a burden on my spouse, and I doubt my/their/our ability to successfully process the sort of hurt feelings, insecurity, distrust, jealousy, etc that I expect will arise, and so it seems likely the marriage will eventually fall apart.

Now, I know, many would either say that we would either be able to sort through the emotional complexities of 1 or 2, or we shouldn't be married. That's easy to say. I myself am pretty prone to saying it. But, when I remind myself that option 3 exists (at least, I'm highly willing to believe that many cheaters honestly believe this option exists):

3) I indulge in the sexual and/or romantic relationship I desire, without telling my spouse. I honestly believe it is possible to keep my spouse in the dark, thus sparing their feelings, and I honestly believe that this affair will allow me to be a better spouse, as I am happy and satisfied in ways I otherwise wouldn't be. My marriage survives cleanly, and everyone is happier for it.

Like, make what arguments you will against the beliefs/assumptions inherent in those options, but *if* someone *truly believes* those are their options, I dare say I don't feel comfortable calling 3 the unethical choice, especially among people who hold their commitment to making sure their marriage persists above being faithful to it in other respects.

(Sudden temptation to ramble about Battlestar Galactica and various attitudes towards marriage contained within only barely averted)
6 yrsMore
Daniel Speyer, profile picture
Daniel Speyer
*How* do you know that this sort of tacitly renegotiated marriage is common? The Ashley Madison data is as easily explained by widespread treachery.
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Mark Hechim, profile picture
Mark Hechim
I blame TV and movies for lowering the bar for relationship communication. The two love interests have to move through various relationship phases in the time allotted, which doesn't leave time for even one real conversation. If you've made the monogamous life commitment to someone, and you've set yourself up emotionally to be devastated by them cheating, you should probably know them better than you expect you could know someone. Assume that you've never been exposed to that kind of intimacy, and that what is possible is beyond your imagination until you've experienced it personally, and don't settle for the kind of relationship you see in the movies. If you can't tell your partner that you find some other people attractive, then there's a huge part of your life you can't share with that person. If you can't share something that basic, then should you really be doing the whole lifelong commitment thing?
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Wendy Hou, profile picture
Wendy Hou
Beatifully written. However I won't refrain from criticizing EnemyX when that person has built a life around acting like The Moral Authority and restricting what other people can do
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Matthew James Ferrantino, profile picture
Matthew James Ferrantino
Depending on your definition of betrayal, it is possible *nobody* except maybe Druggar....ahem....succeeded.....consummated.....any betrayal.
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