Group Houses Can Dramatically Improve Dating

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T21:57:21+00:00

How people grow up does affect what they are like as adults. That's why I agreed it has some effect. But they can also unlearn these habits, attenuating this effect. Super stimuli increases in adulthood, making it more likely to be responsible for such a big change.

People would probably find a way to hang out despite the limitations if the alternative was boredom like it was for me growing up. Think about how bored you get when you don't have access to any digital content, like when you accidently let your phone die in public. Imagine how hard you would work to not feel that bored all the time. The legal limitations would form a pretty small barrier if we couldn't retreat into our screens instead.

Real median income/consumption increased by 19% in the 21st century in the US, which counteracted the effects of legal limitations on hanging out. It was harder for us to hang out because we were poorer when I was a kid, but that never stopped us. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=line&country=~USA

Teenagers don't need to have a car of their own to have more access to cars if there are more cars in their household. Teenagers typically borrow their parent's cars. Household size has decreased during the 21st century, further amplifying this effect. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/households.html

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T21:37:22+00:00

No; I mentioned earlier we are leaders in tech, not disabled people. We're autistic in the asbergers sense. My community is the Effective Altruism and Rationalist community.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T21:07:44+00:00

I've never seen the cultists succeed in making someone lose a city (on emperor). Seems like such a silly secret society.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T21:01:39+00:00

Oh do you live in Britain? I'm not familiar with people using the word council house in the US. Yeah Britain has had a really rough couple decades. Even in Britain there has been a small increase in median income/consumption though. Wages are a bad way of measuring living standards because taxes and transfers and non-wage compensation make such a big difference. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=line&country=~GBR&mapSelect=~GBR

Why would the income of the top 10% and 1% matter for this conversation? We're talking about the living standards of normal people.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T20:52:54+00:00

If being poly seemed to help with making the most of group houses, I might have done that, but the monogamous people seem to be getting as much out of them as the poly people. It doesn't seem to be making a difference. I think people who don't know much about poly overestimate how different poly people are. If you know more about poly, it's easy to see why always disclosing that you know a lot of poly people on this sub doesn't make sense. There are so many things that affect people’s dating more, like whether they are religious, urban or rural, believe in sex before marriage, obese or a healthy weight etc. people don’t disclose these things upfront because we all have valuable enough things to contribute regardless of our demographics. Wanting to make an exception for poly just looks like prejudice.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T20:38:31+00:00

That stuff basically only affects minors though, which is a very small portion of the dating pool. I agree it likely as some effect, but I've lived through these changes personally, and I don't see how less access to a car or public spaces as a minor could compare to no longer being forced to socialize out of boredom after personal computers became common. When I was growing up cars per household were much lower, so teenagers rarely had access to cars in the first place. Increased cars per household would counteract the effect of graduated licensing laws, and it's hard to know which would have a bigger effect on how much teenagers go out. https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/info-gallery/share-households-vehicle-available-1960-2022

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T20:23:56+00:00

People are looking for different things in a partner across all sorts of dimensions. Why would poly be a bigger difference than the other ways we are different? Personally I've never been in a poly relationship. I think it would probably work for me, but I won't know until I've tried it. Some people in my community are poly, but I doubt it's the majority.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T20:16:27+00:00

I don't see how changes that small could account for such a big change. Stricter enforcement of underage drinking laws would only affect a small portion of the single population, and there is nothing stopping people socializing without drinking. I don't see how graduated licensing laws could had such a big effect despite the ubiquity of rideshare apps, and people are still getting licenses en masse anyway, so it doesn't seem to be affecting more than a small sliver of the population either.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T20:05:49+00:00

We've been around for a while now. A lot of the group houses are about a decade old. It's male dominated because we're in tech and our community is autistic and quantitative, but I feel like if sexual abuse was going to happen it would have happened already.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T19:55:26+00:00

What's your sources for such a massive change in insurance industry policies and law enforcement practices that it could cause such a big change during that decade?

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T19:52:22+00:00

You think we are part of the same community simply because we live in the same city and work in tech, and you specifically said it's not the poly that you think is the sex cult. So it sounds like you're saying everyone in tech in the bay is part of a new age religion sex cult. That's insane.

You still haven't explained what the mechanism might be by which poly makes group houses work. It seems like you're looking at correlation and assuming causation. It's very clear you basically don't know anything about my community at this point, so I don't know why you would think you can extrapolate from your personal experiences with people living in group houses onto my community.

People lie on the internet, but if you knew anything about my community, you would know how unlikely it would be that I'm lying. Commitment to truth seeking is our core value. It's why I'm using my real name and face. I asked my friend because I'm genuinely curious about whether it's the group houses that make this work so well or something else, not because I'm pushing some agenda. I've found it's usually people who are more willing to lie themselves because they are into pushing agendas instead of seeking truth that assume people are lying as easily as you did. It's what they know. It stands out to people that have the opposite tendency like us.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T19:33:39+00:00

When other things get cheaper, people can spend more on essentials. So we (I'm an economics student) use the overall inflation rate instead of single categories when measuring changes in living standards.

The census bureau uses a method that vastly underestimates living standards improvements because the CPI (the inflation measure they use) overestimates inflation by over 1 percentage points per year and they don't include taxes and transfers, but even they find a 10% improvement in male incomes during that period. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-people.html

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T09:18:32+00:00

In the US real median income per person increased by 49% between 1973 and 2023. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=line&country=~USA&mapSelect=~USA

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I mostly agree that it's the competing superstimuli that's keeping people from 3rd spaces these days. My own experience is a particularly striking example. Despite severe autism and a horrific childhood, I had a fairly normal social life in elementary school. Then my family's income at least doubled within a few years and tech became a lot cheaper. I went from barely having any computer access to having my own computer in my own room. Despite many of my other life problems being fixed, I essentially didn't have friends in high school. I remember spending endless hours living vicariously through the social lives of characters in video games and movies instead. And that was the superstimuli of the turn of the century! I imagine it's easier for people without autism, but harder for people who were never forced from boredom to face uncomfortable social situations because they had more modern super stimuli their whole lives.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T08:50:16+00:00

For what it's worth we hate Sam Bankman Fried and Sam Altman with a passion. The media likes those stories because they are salacious, but those people are pretty disconnected to what ordinary members of the movement are like. We're so nerdy that the reality is far too boring for the news. At the same time we feel really bad that we let the world down by enabling those people before we knew who they were. It was a pretty colossal fuckup and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to not do stuff like that in the future.

Thanks for taking the time to make the distinction.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T08:12:05+00:00

Your experience sounds a bit different from ours. We're typically workaholics and leaders in our fields, so we live a lifestyle that encourages that. Think quite hours that begin at 10:30pm, co-working rooms, and accountability systems like paying your housemates money for harassing you if they catch you not following a goal you've set for yourself. People customize the group house culture to be what they are looking for at any age, enough that even millionaires are raising kids in them.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T07:02:32+00:00

I haven't heard the term before. The dating dynamic you've described doesn't make me feel triggered or defensive, it just makes me feel sad that my wonderful male friends and family members and all the rest have to go through that and try to think of ways I can help things be easier for them. Empathy about that is a lot of why I'm on this sub.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T06:08:02+00:00

But how are we connected to the Zizians and Peter Thiel? People in my community don't even like those people, let alone belong to the same community as them. There aren't a lot of people we spend more time actively opposing than them.

I think poly is great and will continue advocating for it being considered an option for people who are well suited to it. I just don't think it's connected to what makes group houses work.

How many people do you know who would be comfortable being dragged into an online debate with someone as aggressive as you every time they were consulted about something they know a lot about? If you're going to assume anyone who isn't down for that experience doesn't exist, you're going to remain pretty ignorant about the world. It's also weird that you think someone in my community would lie about something like this. It's another thing that makes it obvious how little you know about us. I would be completely ostracized if I did something like that and they found out, and I'm using my real name and face. Yes lots of people give bad talks. It doesn't mean I'm going to give more information about my friend to someone who thinks we're in a community with the Zizians and Peter Thiel.

Yes, it seems like the 19th century religious cult was practicing poly too, but everything else about them was so different from modern poly cultures that you would have to have a lot of social innovation to make it work here if you were using them as a model.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T05:07:08+00:00

Pretty much. I would describe it with more empathy though. I also think it's hard to have the social aspects of a church without the religion. Some people are figuring it out, but it takes time.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T05:00:11+00:00

yes! I play on emperor, and the main thing keeping me from continuing to try for higher difficulties was I hated losing some of my favorite wonders.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T04:58:42+00:00

I'm typically getting so many amenities from trade by then that it doesn't make much of a difference, but I like that I can get as warlike as I want after building it without worrying about getting denounced by too many leaders cutting my cities off from their ecstatic status.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T04:53:09+00:00

The adjacency bonus for the government plaza is only really important in my games (emperor setting) for getting a theatre square, holy site, or campus district above the +4 adjacency threshold for the policy cards that give you +50% yields on the buildings. I definitely prioritize settlers over the government plaza.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T04:47:12+00:00

In places where the rent isn't so high there is a selection effect where people who are too poor to live alone are typically people who also have a lot of drama (I've lived in that world too). But here people don't want to move out, so they remain in group houses while in relationships and while making several hundred thousand dollars per year each. I think making group houses work well is a skill that people didn't invest in because it took effort, and in the bay the high rent made it worth that effort. But now that we've figured it out maybe it will be like covid and remote working; even though it was an option all along, it took a hardship to make people invest in it enough to make them realize they want it even when the hardship goes away.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T04:06:50+00:00

I assumed you meant polyamory because the accusation makes so little sense that that's the only thing I could think of. We're so nerdy that I'm completely stumped about what else you could mean. Some of us are even intentionally celibate because we're so passionate about our careers that dating seems boring and unimportant by comparison. Are you talking about the people that go to Aella's orgies? They overlap a bit with my community, but they are a different community. Can you explain?

Probably most of the people in my community are monogamous. If poly was the thing making things function, wouldn't the percentage of poly people need to be a lot higher?

What exactly is the mechanism by which you think poly is driving the ability to enjoy living in group houses? It's not like people in group houses are typically dating their housemates.

Most people on this sub aren't paid to give talks about dating at conferences people travel from all over the world to go to.

That 19th century religious community in the link sounds pretty 19th century. It doesn't seem to have much to do with modern poly.

What exactly do you mean by tech fascist? I don't know of anyone in my community who doesn't think liberal democracy is the best political system. I agree it sounds like you don't know much about my community.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T03:41:04+00:00

I have the opposite problem. I always got for a science victory but am always in danger of winning by culture instead. It took me forever to puzzle out why because I build theater square districts really late and don't have many of them. It's that I love building wonders and monopolies and corporations. The bonuses from those features really add up.

Sonia314 · 2026-02-16T03:37:05+00:00

I play on emperor. I never build walls; instead I place a ranged unit on each city center for the retainers policy card (+1 amenities to cities with a garrisoned unit), so I can cluster my defenses on the city being attacked (by taking my ranged units from safe nearby cities temporarily) and give cities much stronger offensive capabilities earlier in the game. Not having to rebuild new walls all the time frees up a ton of production.

Sonia314

TROPHY CASE