Heroin clearly destroys too much of what you already care about. Maybe you’re worried the same thing might be true of companionate love?
This is indeed my concern, and I think you are radically underestimating the extent to which oxytocin typically causes people to sacrifice their non-oxytocin values.
For example, about half the population decides to have one or more kids. That’s a decision whose emotional motivation is usually mainly oxytocin IIUC. It also, notoriously, typically takes over one’s entire life for a decade or more, causing everything else to be thrown under the bus. The whole “midlife crisis” phenomenon is, to my eye, mainly people throwing everything but oxytocin under the bus for a decade, then burning out and needing to relearn to embrace their non-oxytocin values.
Another example: I do not at all buy that most people (or at least most straight males) are able to avoid the trap of money-hungry romantic partners. Here’s an infographic:
Emotional burden is harder to measure, but it again sure seems to me like a majority of people are pretty darn emotionally burdensome. If someone has even such basic skills as “reliably notice when they’re hangry or tired or PMSing and go relax rather than being a pain in the ass”, that already puts them in the upper tiers of the population. And without that sort of skill, people are typically deeply unpleasant to be around something like 20% of the time.
A less confident guess, informed more by my own experiences: I suspect that oxytocin typically pushes people to be a lot less ambitious, in general. Most other value-components either satisfice quickly (e.g. food), or push toward a lot of ambition. Oxytocin is one huge value-component which drives people to sink a large fraction of their attention and resources into local things which don’t pay off in anything much greater. It’s an easier alternative outlet to ambition. People can feel basically-satisfied with their mediocre performance in life so long as they feel that loving connection with the people around them, so they’re not very driven to move beyond mediocrity.
That’s a decision whose emotional motivation is usually mainly oxytocin IIUC.
I strongly doubt this, especially in men. I suspect it plays a role in promoting attachment to already-born kids but not in deciding to have them.
Oxytocin is one huge value-component which drives people to sink a large fraction of their attention and resources into local things which don’t pay off in anything much greater. It’s an easier alternative outlet to ambition. People can feel basically-satisfied with their mediocre performance in life so long as they feel that loving connection with the people around them, so they’re not very driven to move beyond mediocrity.
I know you are posting on LW which is a skewed audience, but most people are mediocre at most things and are unlikely to achieve great feats according to you, even with more ambition. Having a happy family is quite a reasonable ambition for most people. In fact, it is of the few things an everyday guy can do that “pays off in anything much greater” (i.e. the potential for a long generational line and family legacy).
(Also consider that stereotypically, women are the ones who spend the most effort on domestic and child-related matters, and are also less likely to be on the far right of bell curves.)
I have a nine month old son and in no way feel like everything else is getting thrown under the bus (or that my ambition has decreased as a result).
I do obviously care about keeping my son alive and well, and that does require some degree of compromise with my other goals, but I haven’t experienced caring less about my other goals than I did previously.
Also the reasons I care about him have stayed pretty constant both before and after he was actually born, I don’t think oxytocin is noticeably influencing how I feel my goals (my guess is it’s just causing my feelings of affection towards him in small scale interactions).
Another example: I do not at all buy that most people (or at least most straight males) are able to avoid the trap of money-hungry romantic partners. Here’s an infographic:
The infographic you linked does not prove that most people are unable to “avoid the trap of money-hungry romantic partners”.
It does not at all preclude romantic partners from deciding together that they want one partner to be a homemaker or take a less highly paid job in order to pursue their interests.
Many people, especially older straight males who make a decent salary, wish to support their partner and have their partner focus primarily on raising their children. They would prefer this to the alternative where their partner works.
The non-egalitarian parts of this graph do not indicate “money-hungriness”, nor do the egalitarian parts of the graph clear either part of the couples from being “money-hungry.”
It could be true that straight men can’t avoid “money-hungry” partners (in fact, most people need money to survive and pursue their goals), but this chart does not at all communicate that.
It does not at all preclude romantic partners from deciding together that they want one partner to be a homemaker or take a less highly paid job in order to pursue their interests.
It can be either, or a part of both.
Many people, especially older straight males who make a decent salary, wish to support their partner and have their partner focus primarily on raising their children. They would prefer this to the alternative where their partner works.
This can be more complicated than it seems. For example, I have much higher salary than my wife. We could easily live all on my salary alone, but we could not keep our current standards on her salary alone.
Therefore, I “choose” to keep my job, because I don’t have much of an option. And I would be okay if she stayed at home, because it wouldn’t make much of a difference for our family budget, so if it made her happy, why not. Sounds like mostly a free choice I made, doesn’t it?
But if you investigate deeper, you could ask, why the difference in our earning abilities? And a part of the answer is that I have spent large parts of my life trying to increase my salary (not perfectly, I made lots of mistakes), while my wife optimized for having a convenient job. And as a result, now I have a well-paying job, and she has an enjoyable job. And by her long-term choices, she helped create this situation where I don’t have a choice, but she does.
Even if in our society, women are mostly expected to have a job, the expectations are not the same. Men still grow up expecting the need to have a well-paying job, enough to feed the entire family. For most women, a job is more like a hobby; they expect to pay their own bills and that’s it; beyond that, the job is a source of prestige or social contact or meaning. Many men would take meaningless, low-status, socially isolating jobs, if it allowed them to make more money.
So in some sense it is similar to the game of chicken, where the female player already threw her steering wheel out of the window… and the man, seeing that, voluntarily swerves.
Yes, my point was just that the graph alone cannot prove that people aren’t able to avoid “money-hungry” spouses and shouldn’t be cited as if it does. Arguments comparing it to a game of chicken make more sense to me, especially in child-free marriages, although for most marriages, I think it’s important to remember the specific unavoidable burdens on the child-bearing players of the game, a biological “throwing” of the steering wheel out of the window that isn’t at all symmetric between players.
I personally am planning to fully support my future spouse and be the primary breadwinner if they’re amenable to it, and in doing so have unintentionally opened up a larger amount of potential partners I could end up with. In my particular (majority male) social group, I am far more likely to hear complaints about not being able to find a partner who will be a stay at home parent than I am to find complaints about wanting a partner to pay for half of the bills.
I think it is strictly the better position to be in to be the working one while the other partner is taking care of the home, and am personally too ambitious to be willing to take a low paying job or ever be a stay at home parent, but men who wish to do so are of course fine to live their lives that way too.
I agree that the biological burden is asymmetric. But also, in the past, women used to have about dozen children (most of them died at infancy), while today, it is maybe two on average? From this perspective, women today are more similar to men, than to the women of the past.
I am far more likely to hear complaints about not being able to find a partner who will be a stay at home parent than I am to find complaints about wanting a partner to pay for half of the bills.
I suspect that many of them will find neither. Instead, they will probably find a partner who likes their job too much to stay at home, but not enough to pay for half of the bills (and definitely not enough to let your friends stay at home). Because the job is not optimized to pay the bills.
It’s an interesting exercise to take your last paragraph and switch the roles of love and ambition. I wonder if there’s anything productive to be explored between those two perspectives, or if those are just terminal value differences.
My issue with unambitious people is that they rarely think more than a few months ahead. This means they end up not developing skills that would make them interesting to talk to and be around, are usually not doing interesting work, and are usually not even doing work well either. Just enough to get by and live a happy life. My other issues with such people is it seems very selfish to choose mediocrity and happiness in the present over happiness for your children, those around you, those you allegedly care about, and even your own future. It also seems rather stupid and inconsistent to say (and believe) things like, “I want enough money to live nicely, without spending 1/3rd of my days working,” but then also on every given day take no actions to achieve that goal—just enough to make it through the next few months.
Importantly, for me, you do not have to be ambitious to do these things properly. There are also passionate people who just really enjoy the things they’re studying or working on. However, it’s harder to get lucky with the right passion, and it’s also harder to motivate yourself without passion or ambition, so for most people, a lack of ambition is a serious flaw.
I don’t think love (or day-to-day happiness) and ambition are merely different terminal values. I think people who are ambitious in their teens and early twenties can probably experience greater love and happiness for the rest of their lives, so the oxytocin poisoning is actually just making people short-sighted and stupid. It makes sense in an ancestral environment where you could randomly die the next day, but in our modern world we tend to have longer horizons.
I also think John has a visceral reaction of disgust when confronted with unambitious people. I get that. It’s the feeling that, “I worked way harder and I didn’t complain about the hard work. I still work harder than you, in the hope that I can achieve my goal in a few years. I’ve even given you advice to help you catch up that I had to struggle to figure out for myself. Give me a break.”
I think the downsides are maybe just more visible to you than the upsides. To me, avoiding romantic relationships because I might have to provide 60% of the household’s income, or because I have to deal with them being sad or upset sometimes, that seems crazy. (Barring an unreasonable partner, who should be straightforward to avoid. In particular, if you’re dating within the LessWrong neurotype, this is less likely to be an issue, and even less so if you’re specifically selecting for it.) Likewise, I’d never want to give up love just because I have an hour less a day to spend on other things because I want to spend time with my girlfriend. That hour is valuable to me and worth the break from work.
I think you are right that you’d end up somewhat less ambitious, not that there’s a shortage of highly ambitious people who can also feel love. The pattern you pointed to about people being basically satisfied with mediocre performance in life as long as they feel companionate love, I think that’s basically a pattern relegated to those who are societal losers anyway, and love is just a consolation prize. It’s not like cannabis where it makes you unambitious. I’d guess this trap is most common among the working class, where most adults have no realistic shot of success anyway, so they concern themselves more with relationships and friendships.
I’m kind of saying that you’re at least half-right about all your reservations, but that it would be the right decision (IMO) to make the change anyway, if possible. According to your own values, because it’s not that you know what you’re missing and are choosing not to pursue it according to your values. It’s that you don’t know what you’re missing.
Btw companionate love feels pretty satisfice-able to me. Not sure if anyone else feels differently. But I’m in a steady state with my girlfriend, where I feel the desire to spend a certain percentage of my time with her, and beyond that I feel like I’m satisfied, and she feels similarly. More time together after that is nice in the same way that more snack food might still taste somewhat good even when you’re not really hungry anymore.
This is indeed my concern, and I think you are radically underestimating the extent to which oxytocin typically causes people to sacrifice their non-oxytocin values.
For example, about half the population decides to have one or more kids. That’s a decision whose emotional motivation is usually mainly oxytocin IIUC. It also, notoriously, typically takes over one’s entire life for a decade or more, causing everything else to be thrown under the bus. The whole “midlife crisis” phenomenon is, to my eye, mainly people throwing everything but oxytocin under the bus for a decade, then burning out and needing to relearn to embrace their non-oxytocin values.
Another example: I do not at all buy that most people (or at least most straight males) are able to avoid the trap of money-hungry romantic partners. Here’s an infographic:
Emotional burden is harder to measure, but it again sure seems to me like a majority of people are pretty darn emotionally burdensome. If someone has even such basic skills as “reliably notice when they’re hangry or tired or PMSing and go relax rather than being a pain in the ass”, that already puts them in the upper tiers of the population. And without that sort of skill, people are typically deeply unpleasant to be around something like 20% of the time.
A less confident guess, informed more by my own experiences: I suspect that oxytocin typically pushes people to be a lot less ambitious, in general. Most other value-components either satisfice quickly (e.g. food), or push toward a lot of ambition. Oxytocin is one huge value-component which drives people to sink a large fraction of their attention and resources into local things which don’t pay off in anything much greater. It’s an easier alternative outlet to ambition. People can feel basically-satisfied with their mediocre performance in life so long as they feel that loving connection with the people around them, so they’re not very driven to move beyond mediocrity.
I strongly doubt this, especially in men. I suspect it plays a role in promoting attachment to already-born kids but not in deciding to have them.
I know you are posting on LW which is a skewed audience, but most people are mediocre at most things and are unlikely to achieve great feats according to you, even with more ambition. Having a happy family is quite a reasonable ambition for most people. In fact, it is of the few things an everyday guy can do that “pays off in anything much greater” (i.e. the potential for a long generational line and family legacy).
(Also consider that stereotypically, women are the ones who spend the most effort on domestic and child-related matters, and are also less likely to be on the far right of bell curves.)
I have a nine month old son and in no way feel like everything else is getting thrown under the bus (or that my ambition has decreased as a result).
I do obviously care about keeping my son alive and well, and that does require some degree of compromise with my other goals, but I haven’t experienced caring less about my other goals than I did previously.
Also the reasons I care about him have stayed pretty constant both before and after he was actually born, I don’t think oxytocin is noticeably influencing how I feel my goals (my guess is it’s just causing my feelings of affection towards him in small scale interactions).
The infographic you linked does not prove that most people are unable to “avoid the trap of money-hungry romantic partners”.
It does not at all preclude romantic partners from deciding together that they want one partner to be a homemaker or take a less highly paid job in order to pursue their interests.
Many people, especially older straight males who make a decent salary, wish to support their partner and have their partner focus primarily on raising their children. They would prefer this to the alternative where their partner works.
The non-egalitarian parts of this graph do not indicate “money-hungriness”, nor do the egalitarian parts of the graph clear either part of the couples from being “money-hungry.”
It could be true that straight men can’t avoid “money-hungry” partners (in fact, most people need money to survive and pursue their goals), but this chart does not at all communicate that.
It can be either, or a part of both.
This can be more complicated than it seems. For example, I have much higher salary than my wife. We could easily live all on my salary alone, but we could not keep our current standards on her salary alone.
Therefore, I “choose” to keep my job, because I don’t have much of an option. And I would be okay if she stayed at home, because it wouldn’t make much of a difference for our family budget, so if it made her happy, why not. Sounds like mostly a free choice I made, doesn’t it?
But if you investigate deeper, you could ask, why the difference in our earning abilities? And a part of the answer is that I have spent large parts of my life trying to increase my salary (not perfectly, I made lots of mistakes), while my wife optimized for having a convenient job. And as a result, now I have a well-paying job, and she has an enjoyable job. And by her long-term choices, she helped create this situation where I don’t have a choice, but she does.
Even if in our society, women are mostly expected to have a job, the expectations are not the same. Men still grow up expecting the need to have a well-paying job, enough to feed the entire family. For most women, a job is more like a hobby; they expect to pay their own bills and that’s it; beyond that, the job is a source of prestige or social contact or meaning. Many men would take meaningless, low-status, socially isolating jobs, if it allowed them to make more money.
So in some sense it is similar to the game of chicken, where the female player already threw her steering wheel out of the window… and the man, seeing that, voluntarily swerves.
Yes, my point was just that the graph alone cannot prove that people aren’t able to avoid “money-hungry” spouses and shouldn’t be cited as if it does. Arguments comparing it to a game of chicken make more sense to me, especially in child-free marriages, although for most marriages, I think it’s important to remember the specific unavoidable burdens on the child-bearing players of the game, a biological “throwing” of the steering wheel out of the window that isn’t at all symmetric between players.
I personally am planning to fully support my future spouse and be the primary breadwinner if they’re amenable to it, and in doing so have unintentionally opened up a larger amount of potential partners I could end up with. In my particular (majority male) social group, I am far more likely to hear complaints about not being able to find a partner who will be a stay at home parent than I am to find complaints about wanting a partner to pay for half of the bills.
I think it is strictly the better position to be in to be the working one while the other partner is taking care of the home, and am personally too ambitious to be willing to take a low paying job or ever be a stay at home parent, but men who wish to do so are of course fine to live their lives that way too.
I agree that the biological burden is asymmetric. But also, in the past, women used to have about dozen children (most of them died at infancy), while today, it is maybe two on average? From this perspective, women today are more similar to men, than to the women of the past.
I suspect that many of them will find neither. Instead, they will probably find a partner who likes their job too much to stay at home, but not enough to pay for half of the bills (and definitely not enough to let your friends stay at home). Because the job is not optimized to pay the bills.
Also, I’m curious what factors you consider when judging someone’s “performance in life”.
It’s an interesting exercise to take your last paragraph and switch the roles of love and ambition. I wonder if there’s anything productive to be explored between those two perspectives, or if those are just terminal value differences.
My issue with unambitious people is that they rarely think more than a few months ahead. This means they end up not developing skills that would make them interesting to talk to and be around, are usually not doing interesting work, and are usually not even doing work well either. Just enough to get by and live a happy life. My other issues with such people is it seems very selfish to choose mediocrity and happiness in the present over happiness for your children, those around you, those you allegedly care about, and even your own future. It also seems rather stupid and inconsistent to say (and believe) things like, “I want enough money to live nicely, without spending 1/3rd of my days working,” but then also on every given day take no actions to achieve that goal—just enough to make it through the next few months.
Importantly, for me, you do not have to be ambitious to do these things properly. There are also passionate people who just really enjoy the things they’re studying or working on. However, it’s harder to get lucky with the right passion, and it’s also harder to motivate yourself without passion or ambition, so for most people, a lack of ambition is a serious flaw.
I don’t think love (or day-to-day happiness) and ambition are merely different terminal values. I think people who are ambitious in their teens and early twenties can probably experience greater love and happiness for the rest of their lives, so the oxytocin poisoning is actually just making people short-sighted and stupid. It makes sense in an ancestral environment where you could randomly die the next day, but in our modern world we tend to have longer horizons.
I also think John has a visceral reaction of disgust when confronted with unambitious people. I get that. It’s the feeling that, “I worked way harder and I didn’t complain about the hard work. I still work harder than you, in the hope that I can achieve my goal in a few years. I’ve even given you advice to help you catch up that I had to struggle to figure out for myself. Give me a break.”
I think the downsides are maybe just more visible to you than the upsides. To me, avoiding romantic relationships because I might have to provide 60% of the household’s income, or because I have to deal with them being sad or upset sometimes, that seems crazy. (Barring an unreasonable partner, who should be straightforward to avoid. In particular, if you’re dating within the LessWrong neurotype, this is less likely to be an issue, and even less so if you’re specifically selecting for it.) Likewise, I’d never want to give up love just because I have an hour less a day to spend on other things because I want to spend time with my girlfriend. That hour is valuable to me and worth the break from work.
I think you are right that you’d end up somewhat less ambitious, not that there’s a shortage of highly ambitious people who can also feel love. The pattern you pointed to about people being basically satisfied with mediocre performance in life as long as they feel companionate love, I think that’s basically a pattern relegated to those who are societal losers anyway, and love is just a consolation prize. It’s not like cannabis where it makes you unambitious. I’d guess this trap is most common among the working class, where most adults have no realistic shot of success anyway, so they concern themselves more with relationships and friendships.
I’m kind of saying that you’re at least half-right about all your reservations, but that it would be the right decision (IMO) to make the change anyway, if possible. According to your own values, because it’s not that you know what you’re missing and are choosing not to pursue it according to your values. It’s that you don’t know what you’re missing.
Btw companionate love feels pretty satisfice-able to me. Not sure if anyone else feels differently. But I’m in a steady state with my girlfriend, where I feel the desire to spend a certain percentage of my time with her, and beyond that I feel like I’m satisfied, and she feels similarly. More time together after that is nice in the same way that more snack food might still taste somewhat good even when you’re not really hungry anymore.