EY has recapitulated a ton of bullshit he learned as a teenager hanging out on the Extropians listserv with older shitty libertarian dudes. The archives are like a proto-LW, with conversations about race and intelligence, sex and kinks, gender differences, armchair geopolitics, etc, mixed in with fantasizing about the glorious transhuman future. I don’t know that anyone was using poly as a term at that point, but everything I’ve read about the Extropians suggests they were eager early adopters of bullshit Evo-psych ideas about men having “evolved” to fuck lots of women.

"Polyamory" is the excuse that abusive men use now the way they used "free love" in the 1960s. I know people who make the poly thing work; they're honest and communicative, traits that I do not associate with lesswrongs.

I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:

In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand "sp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldn't escape", in Barbara Branden's words, resulting in her and O'Connor's assent.

You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism

I always assumed it was a package deal with the California Ideology.

Interesting question because I bet it's bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.

Like this isn't your grandpa's swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory^1^ with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don't get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.

It's very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.

1. I swear the claudism was unintentional

There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner "I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous" and tell their groupies "who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?" It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.

I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used "sex-positivity" to mean "I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can''t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate." Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.

I don't exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.

As to inexact reasons why... some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)

I don't know the answer, but I've always assumed it's because it's just something Yud is really into.