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"Jealousy is a fear" ... is one form of jealousy but not the only form of jealously. Monotheists describe their deity as jealous by rights, not fear. Political candidates and job applicants want to be chosen and followed over others for reasons that can include fear but are not limited to fear.

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Yes. And the fact that you're not running into this among your friends and associates strongly suggests you are doing something right.

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"If my friends have more other friends, that makes them better not worse friends for me, if their function is to cement my position in a larger social alliance."

This is a manifestation of

1) Concern over loss of the benefits of the relationship

IMO this factor exists but is only part of the picture.  Two additional factors affecting relationship jealousy are

2) Concern over the welfare of the other person3) Concern over how much value the other person places on the relationship (& thus indirectly on oneself)

Consider, for example, which of the following scenarios would tend to make the typical person (not you, of course:-) more jealous:

A) Threat of losing some of  friend X's attention due to X's having a first child B) Threat of losing some of friend X's attention due to X's spending more time with other friends.

If (1) were the whole story, jealousy would be typically be bigger in A than in B.  But IMO a little introspection - scratch that, a little reflection on typical human nature - suggest that in reality it's the opposite:  People typically find A *less* threatening than B.  Why?  Because of (2) and (3).

Another factor relevant to relationship jealousy is

4) People typically have a greater expectation of loyalty from family members and spouses than from friends.

Factor (4) (which we might call the "blood-should-be-thicker-than-water" factor) doesn't bear on A vs B but does IMO further explain why friend jealousy tends to be weaker than family jealousy.

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"Role specialization is a robust way to limit jealousy."

What if the under-attentive subject doesn't see these roles as being similarly specialized? Ex: Female parent, male parent, rather than fav mom and fav dad? Being aware of this while continuing to define your role narrowly is more rationalization than robustness.

"If my friends have more other friends, that makes them better not worse friends for me, if their function is to cement my position in a larger social alliance."

As long as the cementing carries political implications. To the extent it does not (that is, other reasons for having friends*), an otherwise good argument is undermined.

You could rationalize away a friends relatively greater attentiveness to other friends on the basis that the friend is a gateway to a wider social network. However, that friend's relative neglect of you is still an issue unless you can move your own attention to other friends. If not, the opportunity for jealousy still exists.

“You can have lots of friends without jealousy; why not do that with lovers too?”

Why not take the network broadening attitude/point-of-view to lovers?

What actually is the point of being jealous? Is it a motivator for improving role playing, and thereby gaining popularity? Are the subjects of jealousy meant to become aware of the jealousy, or is it something we want to keep hidden? If the former, it acts as a signalling device - it would show to the subject of the jealousy that we care about them, and probably more than they realize. Do the subjects then exploit this knowledge (as it implies a dependancy of sorts)? What about when the knowledge of the jealousy reaches the friend's friends? Should we suppress our jealousies, or would that be harmful to us?

* Friends tend to agree with us, and see the world from our points-of-view, and our worldview. Friends are (relatively) non-competitive with respect to perceptions. Friends are a means for pre-processing inputs. This is stress-relieving, and attention freeing. That would be an example of my perception of the essence of intelligent systems; the capacity to constrain inputs in a non-harmful (to the organism) manner.

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"This is the worst example of reasoning by analogy I have seen in my entire life."

Why?

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My guess is that friends, more than other relations, function in large part to cement our position in larger social coalitions. As a social species, we play a lot of coalition politics, and in coalition politics one needs many allies who themselves have many other allies.

That friendship doesn't necessarily issue in desire for exclusivity seems obvious: if our friends have more friends, they can do more for us. But that this implies coalition politics seems an unwarranted stretch unless accepting certain evo psych posits about paleolithic coalitions—for who knows what purpose—is based on evidence.

"Social species" don't necessarily engage in coalition politics; the phenomenon seems unknown among the most numerous social species, the social insects. Apes engaged in coalition politics, because there was something to ally for: vast differences in status resulted in huge differences in welfare. Among egalitarian foragers, the status drive was both suppressed culturally and attenuated by natural selection, and status equality enforced, leaving one to wonder what the presumed "coalitions" might have sought.

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 Sorry, bad explanation.

Friendships are more abstractly bound while families are innately bound.

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Robin (and Katja) are into solving problems they themselves discover. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that. (I fear you may be the victim of Eliezer Yudkowsky's confused rants against "reasoning by analogy.")

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“You can have lots of friends without jealousy; why not do that with lovers too?”

Seriously, has anyone ever made that argument? This is the worst example of reasoning by analogy I have seen in my entire life.

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Do people with a dulled (heightened) sense of sexual jealousy tend to have a dulled (heightened) sense of nonsexual jealousy as well? My prior would lean towards "yes," and the few standout cases of either I know personally seem to go together, but I don't have more than anecdata and personal experience.

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Best guess.

We can thank liberal dogma  for the greater scope for jealousy. Friendships are interpersonal while families are intrapersonal.

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What coalitions might be supposed to have existed among foragers? Have any evolutionary biologists or psychologists speculated? (Seem like a good topic for a novelistic treatment.)

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