(July 9, 2015 at 10:25 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote:(July 9, 2015 at 7:22 pm)Mr.wizard Wrote: The risk of you getting an std, if one out of ten cheats, is the same as if one out of one cheats. The other nine in the equation do not add to the risk pool if they are faithful. I see your point if 2 or more are cheating because now you would have two cheating partners as opposed to one.
The thing is that with a larger pool of spouses, cheating is more likely.
If you have a 50/50 chance of each spouse cheating, by the time you've accounted for ten spouses, you've got about a .018% chance of all ten spouses being faithful to only the group. If you're only concerning yourself with seven spouses, you still only have a .078% chance of assured fidelity.
In other words, you're ignoring the fact that more spouses increases the likelihood of cheating itself. Of course one of ten spouses cheating doesn't raise the likelihood of herpes any more that one spouse out of one cheating. But assuming that only one out of ten will cheat is naive, given what we know about people. The more people you add into a relationship, the higher the risk of cheating, in direct proportion.
Right, I was just arguing that one cheating spouse out of ten, doesn't put you at more of a risk then one out of one. Any time you have multiple partners who have multiple partners your chance is going to increase. I just don't see how anyone can make the argument that polygamy itself increases your chance for an std, because in the case of polygamous marriage and monogamous marriage, for the chances of std's to increase you have to go outside of the marriage.
