You don’t have polyamory, you hate people who write books makes some very good points, in particular highlighting how most people’s ideas (including mine) about polyamory comes from media, which distorts reality almost as a necessity. “They figured out their issues and lived happy for a very long time” makes for a boring story in general, and so you will not find much of it - for neither monogamy or polyamory, or much of anything else as a matter of fact.
(As an aside, I am actually beginning to dislike this phenomenon. Slice-of-life stories that are about little in particular can be surprisingly insightful, inspiring, and calming. I have recently read the web serial This Used To Be About Dungeons and I have really liked it.)
As I am sure you will be completely shocked to learn, media can and does already give people an inaccurate and unfair view, especially on topics and groups they have little personal experience with; but it actually gets worse with self-help and advice books, like the ones that Scott Alexander’s article is about. He explains:
Advice is disproportionately written by defective people. Healthy people perform naturally and effortlessly. You walk so gracefully that a million man-hours into bipedal robots fail to match your skill. But if some stroke patient or precocious one-year-old asked your secret, you would just say “I put one foot in front of the other.”
If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy. They experience walking as a constant battle to overcome their natural constitution, and so accumulate tips and tricks throughout their lives. Or ask a physical therapist who works with these people and studies them. Just don’t ask someone you see walking especially briskly down the street.
Relationships work the same way. Go to an elderly couple who have been happily married for fifty years, and they’ll give you vapid old-person advice like “Treat every day as a gift from God.” But go to someone who’s struggled with every one of their last thirty-seven relationships, and they’ll be full of suggestions! They’ll tell you all sorts of fascinating things about boundaries and gaslighting and the four-hundred-and-ninety-four principles of nonviolent communication.
To me, this sounds remarkably similar to having mismatched levels of knowledge and experience, though I can’t really see any particular connection. Expertise can be a result of having both knowledge and experience. Somebody with a lot knowledge but no experience can miss the forest for the trees because they can have difficulty telling what matters and what doesn’t. Somebody with a lot of experience and no knowledge is just fumbling in the dark: ever guessing, trying to find common patterns in their experiences, and often led completely astray after falling prey to selection bias.
Anyway, the aforementioned distortion of course also applies to media about lifestyles and groups of people:
You live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention. By definition most of what you come across through semi-formal channels will be preachy, pushy, and associated with the kind of people who are obsessed with talking about themselves. If you learn about some lifestyles through informal channels (eg your family and friends), and others through semiformal channels (eg media and books), the latter will look obviously inferior.
[…] The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe.