You can be a psychopath, and find yourself surrounded by people where “making their lives better” happens only because you like the action “cause them pain for arbitrary reasons”. Or you could be a saint, and find yourself surrounded by people who value being healed, or who need to be protected, and what a coincidence that danger keeps happening.
I’m curious about to what extent these intutions are symmetric. Say that the group of like-minded and mutually friendly extreme masochists existed first, and wanted to create their mutually preferred, mutually satisfying sadist. Do you still have a problem with that?
Or you can be a guardian, and enjoy teaching and protecting people, and find yourself creating people that are weak and in need of guidance.
The above sounds like a description of a “good parent”, as commonly understood! To be consistent with this, do you think that parenting of babies as it currently exist is problematic and creepy, and should be banned once we have the capability to create grown-ups from scratch? (Note that this being even possible depends on whether we can simulate someone’s past without that simulation still counting as it having happened, which is nonobvious.)
The creepy factor is that CelestAI made one being, both less intelligence than possible and less intelligent than need be.
If David had wanted a symmetrically fulfilled partner slightly more intelligent than him, someone he could always learn from, I get the feeling you wouldn’t find it as creepy. (Correct me if that’s not so). But the situation is symmetrical. Why is it important who came first?
Thank you for the questions, and my apologies for the delayed response.
I’m curious about to what extent these intutions are symmetric. Say that the group of like-minded and mutually friendly extreme masochists existed first, and wanted to create their mutually preferred, mutually satisfying sadist. Do you still have a problem with that?
Yes, with the admission that there are specific attributes to masochism and sadism that are common but not universal to all possible relationships or even all sexual relationships with heavy differences in power dynamics(1). It’s less negative in the immediate term, because one hundred and fifty masochists making a single sadist results in a maximum around forty million created beings instead of one trillion. In the long term, the equilibrium ends up pretty identical.
(1) For contrast, the structures in wanting to perform menial labor without recompense are different from those wanting other people to perform labor for you, even before you get to a post-scarcity society. Likewise, there are difference in how prostitution fantasies generally work versus how fantasies about hiring prostitutes do.
Or you can be a guardian, and enjoy teaching and protecting people, and find yourself creating people that are weak and in need of guidance.
The above sounds like a description of a “good parent”, as commonly understood!
I’m not predisposed toward child-raising, but from my understanding the point of “good parent” does not value making someone weak: it values making someone strong. It’s the limitations of the tools that have forced us to deal with years of not being able to stand upright. Parents are generally judged negatively if their offspring are not able to operate our their own by certain points.
To be consistent with this, do you think that parenting of babies as it currently exist is problematic and creepy, and should be banned once we have the capability to create grown-ups from scratch?
If it were possible to simulate or otherwise avoid the joys of the terrible twos, I’d probably consider it more ethical. I don’t know that I have the tools to properly evaluate the loss in values between the two actions, though. Once you’ve got eternity or even a couple reliable centuries, the damages of ten or twenty years bother me a lot less.
These sort of created beings aren’t likely to be in that sort of ten or twenty year timeframe, though. At least according to the Caelum est Conterrens fic, the vast majority of immortals (artificial or uploaded) stay within a fairly limited set of experiences and values based on their initial valueset. You’re not talking about someone being weak for a year or a decade or even a century: they’ll be powerless forever.
I haven’t thought on it enough to say that creating such beings should be banned (although my gut reaction favors doing so), but I do know it’d strike me as very creepy. If it were possible to significantly reduce or eliminate the number of negative development experiences entities undergo, I’d probably encourage it.
If David had wanted a symmetrically fulfilled partner slightly more intelligent than him, someone he could always learn from, I get the feeling you wouldn’t find it as creepy. (Correct me if that’s not so). But the situation is symmetrical. Why is it important who came first?
In that particular case, the equilibrium is less bounded. Butterscotch isn’t able to become better than David or even to desire becoming better than David, and a number of pathways for David’s desire to learn or teach can collapse such that Butterscotch would not be able to become better or desire becoming better than herself.
That’s not really the case the other way around. Someone who wants a mentor that knows more than them has to have an unbounded future in the FiOverse, both for themselves and their mentor.
In the case of intelligence, that’s not that bad. Real-world people tend toward a bounded curve on that, and there are reasons we prefer socializing within a relatively narrow bound downward. Other closed equilibria are more unpleasant. I don’t have the right to say that Lars’ fate is wrong—it at least gets close to the catgirl volcano threshold—but it’s shallow enough to be concerning. This sort of thing isn’t quite wireheading, but it’s close enough to be hard to tell the precise difference.
More generally, some people—quite probably all people—are going to go into the future with hangups. Barring some really massive improvements in philosophy, we may not even know the exacts of those hangups. I’m really hesitant to have a Machine Overlord start zapping neurons to improve things without the permission of the owner’s brains (yes, even recognizing that a sufficiently powerful AI will get the permission it wants).
As a result, that’s going to privilege the values of already-extant entities in ways that I won’t privilege creating new ones: some actions don’t translate through time because of this. I’m hesitant to change David’s (or, once already created, Butterscotch’s) brain against the owner’s will, but since we’re already making Butterscotch’s mind from scratch both the responsibilities and the ethical questions are different.
Me finding some versions creepier than others reflects my personal values, and at least some of those personal values reflect structures that won’t exist in the FiOverse. It’s not as harmful when David talks down to Butterscotch, because she really hasn’t achieved everything he has (and the simulation even gives him easy tools to make sure he’s only teaching her subjects she hasn’t achieved yet), where part of why I find it creepy is because a lot of real-world people assume other folk are less knowledgeable than themselves without good evidence. Self-destructive cycles probably don’t happen under CelestAI’s watch. Lars and his groupies don’t have to worry about unwanted pregnancy, or alcoholism, or anything like that, and at least some of my discomfort comes from those sort of things.
At the same time, I don’t know that I want a universe that doesn’t at least occasionally tempt up beyond or within our comfort zones.
Sorry, I’m not following your first point. The relevant “specific attribute” that sadism and masochism seem to have in this context are that they specifically squick User:gattsuru. If you’re trying to claim something else is objectively bad about them, you’ve not communicated.
I’m not predisposed toward child-raising, but from my understanding the point of “good parent” does not value making someone weak: it values making someone strong.
Yes, and my comparison stands; you specified a person who valued teaching and protecting people, not someone who valued having the experience of teaching and protecting people. Someone with the former desires isn’t going to be happy if the people they’re teaching don’t get stronger.
You seem to be envisaging some maximally perverse hybrid of preference-satisfaction and wireheading, where I don’t actually value really truly teaching someone, but instead of cheaply feeding me delusions, someone’s making actual minds for me to fail to teach!
the vast majority of immortals (artificial or uploaded) stay within a fairly limited set of experiences and values based on their initial valueset.
We are definitely working from very different assumptions here. “stay within a fairly limited set of experiences and values based on their initial valueset” describes, well, anything recognisable as a person. The alternative to that is not a magical being of perfect freedom; it’s being the dude from Permutation City randomly preferring to carve table legs for a century.
In that particular case, the equilibrium is less bounded. Butterscotch isn’t able to become better than David or even to desire becoming better than David, and a number of pathways for David’s desire to learn or teach can collapse such that Butterscotch would not be able to become better or desire becoming better than herself.
I don’t think that’s what we’re given in the story, though. If Butterscotch is made such that she desires self-improvement, then we know that David’s desires cannot in fact collapse in such a way, because otherwise she would have been made differently.
Agreed that it’s a problem if the creator is less omniscient, though.
That’s not really the case the other way around. Someone who wants a mentor that knows more than them has to have an unbounded future in the FiOverse, both for themselves and their mentor.
Butterscotch is that person. That is my point about symmetry.
I don’t have the right to say that Lars’ fate is wrong—it at least gets close to the catgirl volcano threshold—but it’s shallow enough to be concerning. This sort of thing isn’t quite wireheading, but it’s close enough to be hard to tell the precise difference.
But then—what do you want to happen? Presumably you think it is possible for a Lars to actually exist. But from elsewhere in your comment, you don’t want an outside optimiser to step in and make them less “shallow”, and you seem dubious about even the ability to give consent. Would you deem it more authentic to simulate angst und bange unto the end of time?
Say that the group of like-minded and mutually friendly extreme masochists existed first, and wanted to create their mutually preferred, mutually satisfying sadist. Do you still have a problem with that?
That seems less worrying, but I think the asymmetry is inherited from the behaviours themselves—masochism seems inherently creepy in a way that sadism isn’t (fun fact: I’m typing this with fingers with bite marks on them. The recursion is interesting, and somewhat scary—usually if your own behaviour upsets or disgusts you then you want to eliminate. But it seems easy to imagine (in the FiOverse or similar) a masochist who would make themselves suffer more not because they enjoyed suffering but because they didn’t enjoy suffering, in some sense. Like someone who makes themselves an addict because they enjoy being addicted (which would also seem very creepy to me))
To be consistent with this, do you think that parenting of babies as it currently exist is problematic and creepy, and should be banned once we have the capability to create grown-ups from scratch?
Yes. Though I wouldn’t go around saying that for obvious political reasons. (Observation: people who enjoy roleplaying parent/child seem to be seen as perverts even by many BDSM types).
If David had wanted a symmetrically fulfilled partner slightly more intelligent than him, someone he could always learn from, I get the feeling you wouldn’t find it as creepy. (Correct me if that’s not so). But the situation is symmetrical. Why is it important who came first?
I think creating someone less intelligent than you is more creepy than creating someone more intelligent than you for the same reason that creating your willing slave is creepier than creating your willing master—unintelligence is maladaptive, perhaps even self-destructive.
But it seems easy to imagine (in the FiOverse or similar) a masochist who would make themselves suffer more not because they enjoyed suffering but because they didn’t enjoy suffering, in some sense.
Well, OK, but I’m not sure this is interesting. So a mind could maybe be built that was motivated by any given thing to do any other given thing, accompanied by any arbitrary sensation. It seems to me that the intuitive horror here is just appreciating all the terrible degrees of freedom, and once you’ve got over that, you can’t generate interesting new horror by listing lots of particular things that you wouldn’t like to fill those slots (pebble heaps! paperclips! pain!)
In any case, it doesn’t seem a criticism of FiO, where we only see sufficiently humanlike minds getting created.
Like someone who makes themselves an addict because they enjoy being addicted (which would also seem very creepy to me))
Ah, but now you speak of love! :)
I take it you feel much the same regarding romance as you do parenting?
(Observation: people who enjoy roleplaying parent/child seem to be seen as perverts even by many BDSM types)
That seems to be a sacred-value reaction—over-regard for the beauty and rightness of parenting—rather than “parenting is creepy so you’re double creepy for roleplaying it”, as you would have it.
I think creating someone less intelligent than you is more creepy than creating someone more intelligent than you for the same reason that creating your willing slave is creepier than creating your willing master—unintelligence is maladaptive, perhaps even self-destructive.
Maladaptivity per se doesn’t work as a criticism of FiO, because that’s a managed universe where you can’t self-destruct. In an unmanaged universe, sure, having a mentally disabled child is morally dubious (at least partly) because you won’t always be there to look after it; as would be creating a house elf if there was any possibility that their only source of satisfaction could be automated away by washing robots.
But it seems like your real rejection is to do with any kind of unequal power relationship; which sounds nice, but it’s not clear how any interesting social interaction ever happens in a universe of perfect equals. You at least need unequal knowledge of each other’s internal states, or what’s the point of even talking?
Well, OK, but I’m not sure this is interesting. So a mind could maybe be built that was motivated by any given thing to do any other given thing, accompanied by any arbitrary sensation. It seems to me that the intuitive horror here is just appreciating all the terrible degrees of freedom, and once you’ve got over that, you can’t generate interesting new horror by listing lots of particular things that you wouldn’t like to fill those slots (pebble heaps! paperclips! pain!)
You’re right, I understated my case. I’m worried that there’s no path for masochists in this kind of simulated universe (with self-modification available) to ever stop being masochists—I think it’s mostly external restraints that push people away from it, and without those we would just spiral further into masochism, to the exclusion of all else. I guess that could apply to any other hobby—there’s a risk that people would self-modify to be more and more into stamp-collecting or whatever they particularly enjoyed, to the exclusion of all else—but I think for most possible hobbies the suffering associated with becoming less human (and, I think, more wireheady) would pull them out of it. For masochism that safety doesn’t exist.
I take it you feel much the same regarding romance as you do parenting?
I think normal people don’t treat romance like an addiction, and those that do (“clingy”) are rightly seen as creepy.
That seems to be a sacred-value reaction—over-regard for the beauty and rightness of parenting—rather than “parenting is creepy so you’re double creepy for roleplaying it”, as you would have it.
Maybe. I think the importance of being parented for a child overrides the creepiness of it. We treat people who want to parent someone else’s child as creepy.
Maladaptivity per se doesn’t work as a criticism of FiO, because that’s a managed universe where you can’t self-destruct. In an unmanaged universe, sure, having a mentally disabled child is morally dubious (at least partly) because you won’t always be there to look after it; as would be creating a house elf if there was any possibility that their only source of satisfaction could be automated away by washing robots.
Sure, so maybe it’s not actually a problem, it just seems like one because it would be a problem in our current universe. A lot of human moral “ick” judgements are like that.
Or maybe there’s another reason. But the creepiness in undeniably there. (At least, it is for me. Whether or not you think it’s a good thing on an intellectual level, does it not seem viscerally creepy to you?)
But it seems like your real rejection is to do with any kind of unequal power relationship; which sounds nice, but it’s not clear how any interesting social interaction ever happens in a universe of perfect equals. You at least need unequal knowledge of each other’s internal states, or what’s the point of even talking?
Well I evidently don’t have a problem with it between humans. And like I said, creating your superiors seems much less creepy than creating your inferiors. So I don’t think it’s as simple as objecting to unequal power relationships.
I’m worried that there’s no path for masochists in this kind of simulated universe (with self-modification available) to ever stop being masochists—I think it’s mostly external restraints that push people away from it, and without those we would just spiral further into masochism, to the exclusion of all else.
I think we’re using these words differently. You seem to be using “masochism” to mean some sort of fully general “preferring to be frustrated in one’s preferences”. If this is even coherent, I don’t get why it’s a particularly dangerous attractor.
I think normal people don’t treat romance like an addiction, and those that do (“clingy”) are rightly seen as creepy.
Disagree. The source of creepiness seems to be non-reciprocity. Two people being equally mutually clingy are the acme of romantic love.
We treat people who want to parent someone else’s child as creepy.
I queried my brain for easy cheap retorts to this and it came back with immediate cache hits on “no we don’t, we call them aunties and godparents and positive role models, paranoid modern westerners, it takes a village yada yada yada”. All that is probably unfounded bullshit, but it’s immediately present in my head as part of the environment and so likely in yours, so I assume you meant something different?
(At least, it is for me. Whether or not you think it’s a good thing on an intellectual level, does it not seem viscerally creepy to you?)
No, not as far as I can tell. But I suspect I’m an emotional outlier here and you are the more representative.
I queried my brain for easy cheap retorts to this and it came back with immediate cache hits on “no we don’t, we call them aunties and godparents and positive role models, paranoid modern westerners, it takes a village yada yada yada”.
All that is probably unfounded bullshit, but it’s immediately present in my head as part of the environment and so likely in yours, so I assume you meant something different?
No, those examples really didn’t come to mind. Aunties and godparents are expected to do a certain amount of parent-like stuff, true, but I think there are boundaries to that and overmuch interest would definitely seem creepy (likewise with professional childcarers). But yeah, that could easily be very culture-specific.
Thank you for trying to explain.
I’m curious about to what extent these intutions are symmetric. Say that the group of like-minded and mutually friendly extreme masochists existed first, and wanted to create their mutually preferred, mutually satisfying sadist. Do you still have a problem with that?
The above sounds like a description of a “good parent”, as commonly understood! To be consistent with this, do you think that parenting of babies as it currently exist is problematic and creepy, and should be banned once we have the capability to create grown-ups from scratch?
(Note that this being even possible depends on whether we can simulate someone’s past without that simulation still counting as it having happened, which is nonobvious.)
If David had wanted a symmetrically fulfilled partner slightly more intelligent than him, someone he could always learn from, I get the feeling you wouldn’t find it as creepy. (Correct me if that’s not so). But the situation is symmetrical. Why is it important who came first?
Thank you for the questions, and my apologies for the delayed response.
Yes, with the admission that there are specific attributes to masochism and sadism that are common but not universal to all possible relationships or even all sexual relationships with heavy differences in power dynamics(1). It’s less negative in the immediate term, because one hundred and fifty masochists making a single sadist results in a maximum around forty million created beings instead of one trillion. In the long term, the equilibrium ends up pretty identical.
(1) For contrast, the structures in wanting to perform menial labor without recompense are different from those wanting other people to perform labor for you, even before you get to a post-scarcity society. Likewise, there are difference in how prostitution fantasies generally work versus how fantasies about hiring prostitutes do.
I’m not predisposed toward child-raising, but from my understanding the point of “good parent” does not value making someone weak: it values making someone strong. It’s the limitations of the tools that have forced us to deal with years of not being able to stand upright. Parents are generally judged negatively if their offspring are not able to operate our their own by certain points.
If it were possible to simulate or otherwise avoid the joys of the terrible twos, I’d probably consider it more ethical. I don’t know that I have the tools to properly evaluate the loss in values between the two actions, though. Once you’ve got eternity or even a couple reliable centuries, the damages of ten or twenty years bother me a lot less.
These sort of created beings aren’t likely to be in that sort of ten or twenty year timeframe, though. At least according to the Caelum est Conterrens fic, the vast majority of immortals (artificial or uploaded) stay within a fairly limited set of experiences and values based on their initial valueset. You’re not talking about someone being weak for a year or a decade or even a century: they’ll be powerless forever.
I haven’t thought on it enough to say that creating such beings should be banned (although my gut reaction favors doing so), but I do know it’d strike me as very creepy. If it were possible to significantly reduce or eliminate the number of negative development experiences entities undergo, I’d probably encourage it.
In that particular case, the equilibrium is less bounded. Butterscotch isn’t able to become better than David or even to desire becoming better than David, and a number of pathways for David’s desire to learn or teach can collapse such that Butterscotch would not be able to become better or desire becoming better than herself.
That’s not really the case the other way around. Someone who wants a mentor that knows more than them has to have an unbounded future in the FiOverse, both for themselves and their mentor.
In the case of intelligence, that’s not that bad. Real-world people tend toward a bounded curve on that, and there are reasons we prefer socializing within a relatively narrow bound downward. Other closed equilibria are more unpleasant. I don’t have the right to say that Lars’ fate is wrong—it at least gets close to the catgirl volcano threshold—but it’s shallow enough to be concerning. This sort of thing isn’t quite wireheading, but it’s close enough to be hard to tell the precise difference.
More generally, some people—quite probably all people—are going to go into the future with hangups. Barring some really massive improvements in philosophy, we may not even know the exacts of those hangups. I’m really hesitant to have a Machine Overlord start zapping neurons to improve things without the permission of the owner’s brains (yes, even recognizing that a sufficiently powerful AI will get the permission it wants).
As a result, that’s going to privilege the values of already-extant entities in ways that I won’t privilege creating new ones: some actions don’t translate through time because of this. I’m hesitant to change David’s (or, once already created, Butterscotch’s) brain against the owner’s will, but since we’re already making Butterscotch’s mind from scratch both the responsibilities and the ethical questions are different.
Me finding some versions creepier than others reflects my personal values, and at least some of those personal values reflect structures that won’t exist in the FiOverse. It’s not as harmful when David talks down to Butterscotch, because she really hasn’t achieved everything he has (and the simulation even gives him easy tools to make sure he’s only teaching her subjects she hasn’t achieved yet), where part of why I find it creepy is because a lot of real-world people assume other folk are less knowledgeable than themselves without good evidence. Self-destructive cycles probably don’t happen under CelestAI’s watch. Lars and his groupies don’t have to worry about unwanted pregnancy, or alcoholism, or anything like that, and at least some of my discomfort comes from those sort of things.
At the same time, I don’t know that I want a universe that doesn’t at least occasionally tempt up beyond or within our comfort zones.
Sorry, I’m not following your first point. The relevant “specific attribute” that sadism and masochism seem to have in this context are that they specifically squick User:gattsuru. If you’re trying to claim something else is objectively bad about them, you’ve not communicated.
Yes, and my comparison stands; you specified a person who valued teaching and protecting people, not someone who valued having the experience of teaching and protecting people. Someone with the former desires isn’t going to be happy if the people they’re teaching don’t get stronger. You seem to be envisaging some maximally perverse hybrid of preference-satisfaction and wireheading, where I don’t actually value really truly teaching someone, but instead of cheaply feeding me delusions, someone’s making actual minds for me to fail to teach!
We are definitely working from very different assumptions here. “stay within a fairly limited set of experiences and values based on their initial valueset” describes, well, anything recognisable as a person. The alternative to that is not a magical being of perfect freedom; it’s being the dude from Permutation City randomly preferring to carve table legs for a century.
I don’t think that’s what we’re given in the story, though. If Butterscotch is made such that she desires self-improvement, then we know that David’s desires cannot in fact collapse in such a way, because otherwise she would have been made differently. Agreed that it’s a problem if the creator is less omniscient, though.
Butterscotch is that person. That is my point about symmetry.
But then—what do you want to happen? Presumably you think it is possible for a Lars to actually exist. But from elsewhere in your comment, you don’t want an outside optimiser to step in and make them less “shallow”, and you seem dubious about even the ability to give consent. Would you deem it more authentic to simulate angst und bange unto the end of time?
That seems less worrying, but I think the asymmetry is inherited from the behaviours themselves—masochism seems inherently creepy in a way that sadism isn’t (fun fact: I’m typing this with fingers with bite marks on them. The recursion is interesting, and somewhat scary—usually if your own behaviour upsets or disgusts you then you want to eliminate. But it seems easy to imagine (in the FiOverse or similar) a masochist who would make themselves suffer more not because they enjoyed suffering but because they didn’t enjoy suffering, in some sense. Like someone who makes themselves an addict because they enjoy being addicted (which would also seem very creepy to me))
Yes. Though I wouldn’t go around saying that for obvious political reasons. (Observation: people who enjoy roleplaying parent/child seem to be seen as perverts even by many BDSM types).
I think creating someone less intelligent than you is more creepy than creating someone more intelligent than you for the same reason that creating your willing slave is creepier than creating your willing master—unintelligence is maladaptive, perhaps even self-destructive.
Well, OK, but I’m not sure this is interesting. So a mind could maybe be built that was motivated by any given thing to do any other given thing, accompanied by any arbitrary sensation. It seems to me that the intuitive horror here is just appreciating all the terrible degrees of freedom, and once you’ve got over that, you can’t generate interesting new horror by listing lots of particular things that you wouldn’t like to fill those slots (pebble heaps! paperclips! pain!)
In any case, it doesn’t seem a criticism of FiO, where we only see sufficiently humanlike minds getting created.
Ah, but now you speak of love! :)
I take it you feel much the same regarding romance as you do parenting?
That seems to be a sacred-value reaction—over-regard for the beauty and rightness of parenting—rather than “parenting is creepy so you’re double creepy for roleplaying it”, as you would have it.
Maladaptivity per se doesn’t work as a criticism of FiO, because that’s a managed universe where you can’t self-destruct. In an unmanaged universe, sure, having a mentally disabled child is morally dubious (at least partly) because you won’t always be there to look after it; as would be creating a house elf if there was any possibility that their only source of satisfaction could be automated away by washing robots.
But it seems like your real rejection is to do with any kind of unequal power relationship; which sounds nice, but it’s not clear how any interesting social interaction ever happens in a universe of perfect equals. You at least need unequal knowledge of each other’s internal states, or what’s the point of even talking?
You’re right, I understated my case. I’m worried that there’s no path for masochists in this kind of simulated universe (with self-modification available) to ever stop being masochists—I think it’s mostly external restraints that push people away from it, and without those we would just spiral further into masochism, to the exclusion of all else. I guess that could apply to any other hobby—there’s a risk that people would self-modify to be more and more into stamp-collecting or whatever they particularly enjoyed, to the exclusion of all else—but I think for most possible hobbies the suffering associated with becoming less human (and, I think, more wireheady) would pull them out of it. For masochism that safety doesn’t exist.
I think normal people don’t treat romance like an addiction, and those that do (“clingy”) are rightly seen as creepy.
Maybe. I think the importance of being parented for a child overrides the creepiness of it. We treat people who want to parent someone else’s child as creepy.
Sure, so maybe it’s not actually a problem, it just seems like one because it would be a problem in our current universe. A lot of human moral “ick” judgements are like that.
Or maybe there’s another reason. But the creepiness in undeniably there. (At least, it is for me. Whether or not you think it’s a good thing on an intellectual level, does it not seem viscerally creepy to you?)
Well I evidently don’t have a problem with it between humans. And like I said, creating your superiors seems much less creepy than creating your inferiors. So I don’t think it’s as simple as objecting to unequal power relationships.
I think we’re using these words differently. You seem to be using “masochism” to mean some sort of fully general “preferring to be frustrated in one’s preferences”. If this is even coherent, I don’t get why it’s a particularly dangerous attractor.
Disagree. The source of creepiness seems to be non-reciprocity. Two people being equally mutually clingy are the acme of romantic love.
I queried my brain for easy cheap retorts to this and it came back with immediate cache hits on “no we don’t, we call them aunties and godparents and positive role models, paranoid modern westerners, it takes a village yada yada yada”.
All that is probably unfounded bullshit, but it’s immediately present in my head as part of the environment and so likely in yours, so I assume you meant something different?
No, not as far as I can tell. But I suspect I’m an emotional outlier here and you are the more representative.
No, those examples really didn’t come to mind. Aunties and godparents are expected to do a certain amount of parent-like stuff, true, but I think there are boundaries to that and overmuch interest would definitely seem creepy (likewise with professional childcarers). But yeah, that could easily be very culture-specific.