A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
Meta:
This was written for myself to clarify various thoughts; if you’re seeing it then I thought other people might find value in it or might provide valuable-to-me responses, but other people are not really the audience.
“We” = “I”; it’s a dialogue amongst parts of myself.
Voice 1: A couple months ago I wrote The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships. On a personal level, the main motivation for that post was… I saw people around me who seemed to really highly value their relationships, and when I looked at those relationships, the value people put on them just didn’t add up. Like, when I looked at those relationships, they seemed usually pretty marginal-value at best, and very often just outright net negative (usually moreso for the males). Yet the people in those relationships seemed to think they were super high-value. So I figured, hmm, they must be getting some sort of massive value out of these relationships which I haven’t seen or understood for some reason. What the heck is that value?
So I talked to some people, synthesized what I heard with general background models, and The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships was the result. Overcompressed answer: the main value proposition of romantic relationships is a cluster of stuff downstream of willingness to be vulnerable, including emotional support, play, forming a tiny high-trust community, and ability to communicate tough things. Under the model, these seemingly-disparate things cluster because they’re downstream of willingness to be vulnerable. And I’m still not sure that model quite hit the nail on the head; many commenters thought it was almost-but-not-quite pointing to the thing (though they all pointed to different alternatives). But based on the responses to that post, it seems at least pretty close.
Which brings us to today’s topic: when I look at the model from The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships, and consider how I’d feel in a relationship which had all the aspects which that post talks about… I mean, it would be good, don’t get me wrong, but it still doesn’t feel that valuable. More than just marginal, but not enough that it would be the unambiguous largest value-contributor of a relationship. Presumably I am still missing something.
And I do have various signs that I’m still missing something big in a general cluster to which this topic belongs, so it seems worth digging into.
Voice 2: Ok, so, let’s start with a standard hypothetical. I’ll use Falkovich’s wording from one of his Second Person writings:
What’s your deepest insecurity or shame around dating? An unfulfilled aspiration, a personal flaw you could never fix, an obsession too cringe to share? What would it feel like if someone not only accepted it, but was specifically drawn to it?
This fits the “value downstream of willingness to be vulnerable” model very directly, and the way it asks makes it clear that Jacob expects people to find this hypothetical very high-value. So how do we feel about it?
Voice 1: Yeah, my immediate reaction to that one is “yuck”. Someone who’s specifically drawn to something which I myself am ashamed of? That would be a reason to not date that person; unambiguous negative value add.
Unpacking that instinctive response… I think the core thing here is that such a person wants me to be a weaker/worse person by my own lights. This is not a person who would make me stronger, who would push me to be stronger, at least in this one way. This is a person who would encourage me to embrace my own mediocrity, in whatever way it is that I’m mediocre, and just be happy with it.
… Actually, going back and rereading the prompt, my response here perhaps has some nonobvious assumptions built in. Like, presumably many peoples’ answers to that prompt would be sexual kinks—probably not even very unusual ones, just relatively-standard stuff like nonconsent or furries, where it seems outside the overton window if you don’t already know that there’s whole communities around these kinks. And I don’t think I have anything like that; I’m perfectly comfortable sharing my own sexual kinks[1] and the like, even if they’re arguably somewhat taboo.
As a general rule, if I’m ashamed of something about myself, it’s something I consider a shortcoming by my own lights and I want to fix it, not embrace it. (Though I might not necessarily be allocating effort to fixing it right now; not everything can be top priority.) I’m generally reflectively stable about my own values (of which sexual kinks are a special case), and not ashamed of those. And yes, reflective stability about my own values includes basic stuff like “needing to not work literally all the time”, which novices have a tendency to overlook to their severe detriment.
I don’t think there’s anything even remotely in the vicinity of this prompt where I’d feel the way Falkovich seems to expect me to feel.
Voice 2: Ok, then let’s try a different direction. Here’s David’s response to the Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships post:
I think at least the “willingness to be vulnerable” is downstream of a more important thing which is upstream of other important things besides “willingness to be vulnerable.” The way I’ve articulated that node so far is, “A mutual happy promise of, ‘I got you’ ”. (And I still don’t think that’s quite all of the thing which you quoted me trying to describe.)
So, mutual happy promise of ‘I got you’. How does that one sound? How do you feel about a relationship with a mutual happy promise of ‘I got you’?
Voice 1: First, I’ll note that I expressed skepticism of that one at the time. My main reason for skepticism was that I know at least one person who strongly agreed with David’s take, but is themselves in a relationship in which their partner unambiguously does not have their back (for lack of ability, not lack of will), yet that person still thinks they’re getting the main value proposition of relationships, whatever that may be.
Anyway, trying on the hypothetical… my knee-jerk reaction is, like, “ok I guess”? Like, I just… don’t particularly need someone to have my back? I have my shit together enough that I outright fall apart very rarely, and I have structured my life to generally have ample slack, so even if I do fall apart it’s nondisastrous.
But let’s check if there’s anything nearby which clicks more…
[...]
Ah. Oof. Ok, so, this is gonna require a little background. Setting aside the extent to which this is true, the way I feel about the field of alignment right now is that lots of people are trying to get other people to solve the problem, and lots of people are hoping to get LLMs to solve the problem, and the LLMs mostly just repackage things which were already written online, so nearly the entire field is entities outsourcing the work to other entities, until it grounds out in like two guys in an office somewhere who are actually working on the damn thing themselves. With the obvious two guys in question being me and David.
Point is: it would be absolutely amazing for someone else to have my back, when it comes to handling alignment of strong AI. That prospect was what I moved to the East Bay for, it was what I poured so much time into training people for. On the days (or weeks, or even months) when David and I are stuck, it would be great to know that someone else is actually doing the thing.
And if that person was also a romantic partner? Yeah, I’d give the world for that. That would actually feel like facing the world together with another person.
I could easily imagine feeling the same about someone on track to solve aging. That’s what I’d be doing if AI didn’t look like the higher priority, and I sure do feel the weight of failing to pursue it. I look at the field around it, and much like alignment, I mostly see clueless people larping; the last substantive unit of progress I know of was a decade ago. Man, it would be great if someone actually had my back there, if I could actually reasonably expect the problem to be solved without me having to pay attention to it. And if a romantic partner had my back in that department? Again, I’d give the world for that.
So, ok, maybe the ‘got your back’ thing has some legs to it. It’s just that the places where I feel enough chance of failure that I actually want someone to have my back are, like, actually hard. I don’t need someone to have my back for easy things.
(Also important to note: for both of these particular high-value possibilities, there probably just does not exist any candidate romantic partner who would fit. I would very likely have heard of them by now. But part of the point of this exercise is to explore the possibility space, so hopefully these two examples point to other high-value possibilities.)
Voice 2: I note that those examples both sound like finding a highly agentic equal partner. And people do seem to find a lot of value in other patterns besides that? People do have kids and pets, and there are definitely lots of happy relationships which are basically like that.
Voice 1: My knee-jerk reaction is “man, I do not need another dependent”. Like, clearly a lot of people want to be needed by someone, want to be responsible for other people. Whatever instinctive need there is for being-needed, mine is entirely saturated already by the whole AI thing. I would be fine with being needed less, if anything.
To be clear, that’s not to say I’m unwilling to take on more responsibility for other people. That’s definitely a pattern with my casual partners, for instance. And I’m fine with that, in the context of an overall-worthwhile broader relationship. But I wouldn’t consider it an upside, for me.
(Actually, on reflection I don’t think it’s that my need-to-be-needed is saturated by the AI thing. I think the real need is not so much to be needed, as to provide ample value to other people. And I think my need-to-provide-value-to-others would still be saturated even without the AI thing; even working at something else I’d create plenty of value.)
Voice 2: Ok, how about another pattern? Uli brought up the Comet King’s wife in Unsong as an example. Someone who is smart and competent and agentic (in the sense of figuring out how to achieve goals rather than just following a social script), but takes a support role for someone else. (And a concern we’ve heard from Uli and others is that the rationalist culture might just dismiss such a person, or accidentally alienate them, or some such.) Would that sort of relationship in fact be high value for us?
Voice 1: There’s definitely versions of that which would be very high value to me, and it’s a type of value-contribution which I’ve pretty explicitly tried to encourage in the past (e.g. the post How To Play A Support Role In Research Conversations), and a skillset I’ve explicitly tried to cultivate myself to some extent.
That said… the most common versions look like pretty marginal value, and the high value versions are very rare AFAICT. Unpacking that would stray pretty far from the point of this post, though. This axis (you might call it the corrigible vs sovereign axis) seems largely orthogonal to whatever the main value proposition of romantic relationships is supposed to be. So it’s probably not the main thing I’m missing here, one way or another.
Voice 2: Cool, then let’s try to get back to the main thread.
Voice 1: Here’s a thought, starting from the Falkovich thread above and thinking about how it would look in the context of my previous long relationship: it seems like a thing the large majority of people want is to be good enough, to be loved as they are, to have a partner who thinks they’re perfect, that sort of thing. And in practice, a partner who acts like I’m basically not importantly imperfect is a partner who does not push me to grow stronger or help me to grow stronger. On the flip side, if a partner is pushing me to grow stronger, then they’re not treating me like I’m already perfect. There is no growth without recognizing some way in which one is less than perfect.
Another way to put it:
If a partner makes you grow stronger and better, that means they’re not acting like you’re good enough as you are.
If a partner acts like you’re good enough as you are, they’re not pushing you to grow stronger and better.
In any particular domain, you can choose at most one of those two things, you can’t have both. And I think most people crave the “good enough as you are” option (even if they profess otherwise), while I’m hitting the “grow stronger and better” option over and over again and have been for a long time and don’t ever expect to stop. And I definitely want a partner who at the bare minimum will help me continue to grow better and stronger, and ideally will grow better and stronger with me. Which means neither of us acting like the other is good enough as they are.
This also feels like it maybe ties into many responses to the empathy posts? Like, maybe the core thing nail-in-head-girl wants on a gut level is for her partner to act like she’s good enough as she is, like there’s nothing wrong with her which needs fixing, or something like that? Then my “yuck” response to her is similar to my “yuck” response to the idea of a partner being drawn to my flaws (and therefore this model maybe compresses some of my observations about how my instinctive responses differ from other peoples’ instinctive responses).
I dunno, this seems like a frame/hypothesis which could maybe account for a bunch of things by hypothesizing this particular delta between myself and a typical human. But I’m not entirely convinced that it’s the main thing here, or that it’s the right frame. Maybe it will prompt useful refinements.
- ^
go ahead, ask in the comment section, I have no problem talking about this publicly
This isn’t true for everyone. You can want to get even better while still thinking you’re good enough to be loved, and lots of people find it easier under those circumstances.
Agree. It could also be that your desire to keep growing is one of the things that your partner considers good about you, and that they express frequent appreciation when you’ve in fact put work into growing and also gotten better. So you are good as you are, where “as you are” = “being the kind of a person who keeps growing and wants to continue doing so”.
More generally, there’s a difference between judgment and discernment. If you judge someone, you are considering them to be e.g. morally or intrinsically bad, in ways that lead you to express disapproval (out loud or just in your head). If you are being discerning, you merely note that someone could be better, without that being a judgment on them.
I think the quoted bit from the OP is failing to make that distinction. People want a partner that doesn’t judge them, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily want a partner who is undiscerning of the ways where they could improve. (Some people do also want a partner who’s undiscerning! But not all.)
That is the stance I most often take toward myself, too.
To be clear, I do make this distinction in my head. The problem is that it’s a very hard distinction to signal out loud; expressing discernment will often cause people to immediately assume there’s judgement. The quoted section was trying to gesture at the fact that people very often conflate the two, so it’s hard to convey one without the other.
I disagree that it’s hard, in the relevant context.
It’s hard to communicate this to someone who don’t have a distinction between the two concepts in their head. It’s also hard to communicate this with someone who are two quick to jump to conclutions regarding what you mean to say, and also have bad priors about you. This is enough of a problem, that I don’t recommend offering decernments to people you don’t know well. But that’s also kind of a mute point, since I think it’s bad to offer unsolicited advice to people you don’t know well, for other reasons.
But with someone like a romantic parner, or a close friend, with whom you’d have lots of long form conversation, I don’t think it’s hard.
You can infact just say: “I love you as you are, and among the things I love about you is the desire to grow stronger. I’ve noticed a way you could be stronger, do you want to hear it now or later?”
Or if you have extablished the words “desernment vs judgment” you can just pre-prease any suggestion for imporvment with “desernment”. Or what ever communication style works for you.
Later into the relationship, you might not even have to clarify, but the person will just have the correct prior that you’re expressing a desernment, and not a judgment.
On reflection, I think this maybe conflicts with my observations of most people. Not necessarily that it’s literally false as stated, but that the true versions of it don’t generalize very far.
There is a true interpretation: if somebody picks up e.g. chess for the first time, and finds that they’re pretty good at it for a beginner, sometimes that makes them want to practice it more and get better. That I definitely buy.
Another true interpretation: when people feel like they have slack and a safety net, including the emotional safety net of a partner who will still be there if they fail, they’re more likely to do the sort of hard things which induce lots of growth but have nontrivial chance of failure. Starting a business would be a canonical example.
But I observe that most people, most of the time after reaching adulthood, are remarkably well-described as growth minimizers, subject to the constraints of their environment (which sometimes forces some growth). For instance, the supermajority of college students are well-described as learning as little as possible while still getting the degree they want. The supermajority of people in general will spend lots of time repeatedly doing the things they think they’re already good at or get positive feedback for, and avoid things they’re bad at. New managers or new parents will be forced to develop some skills, but they rarely develop those skills further than they have to. New hires take only a few months to ramp up (often less), and then plateau. The most reliable method for getting in shape is to join the military, where the environment will force you to get into shape.
Of course that isn’t a perfect model, but it fits what I see remarkably well and remarkably often.
And with that in mind, I sure do expect people to normally satisfice on growth. Far more often than not, if someone thinks they’re good enough in some domain, if someone is told they’re good enough in some domain, they will respond by not growing in that domain. The opposite can happen, but those tend to be the unusual cases which define a person’s identity, not the usual cases which dominate their life.
And this is exactly what makes it so high value for one’s environment to contain a partner who is always pushing one to grow more.
Maybe the reason people stick to what they are good at, is not lack of motivation to explore, but lack of safety net to explore. This seems to explain all your observations, if you assume most people are much more anxious than you. In this case, what other people need to grow is more acceptance in their life, not more pushing.
I definitely buy that “most people are much more anxious than me” is a key load-bearing factor here. I do not buy that the anxiety goes away when one has a safety net. Anxiety generally directs itself at various ways things could go wrong, so it often feels like more safety net would yield less anxiety. But from the people I’ve best known who have lots of anxiety, it seems much more like the anxiety is a conserved quantity. Remove one thing they’re anxious about, and their subconscious will promptly find something else to be anxious about.
(This is a common pattern with lots of emotions—e.g. the most obvious evidence of hangriness or hormonal anger is that if one thing the person is angry about is resolved, they promptly become angry about something else.)
I don’t know what is true for the typical person, and I’m definatly not a typical person.
With those caviats, what you describe is not true for me. To feel ok, I need to have a handfull of close friends that I see regularly. This provides some sort of validation, among other values. If I have this, my social anxiety is low. If I don’t have this my anxiety is high, and causes lot’s of problems.
It might look like my anxiety was recistant to be cured by more safety, because it took me a long time to find the people I need. Before I found people of my approximat neurotype, I was so far from being ok, that it was unclear to me that the thing I could clearly feel I was missing, was something that could exist.
And it’s not the case that the further from the safe situation I am, the more anxiety I feel. It’s more like a step function.
Also, sometimes the anxiety need some time to fully update on a new situation. This looks like the anxiety comming back. And then I focus on the evidence that things are acctually ok, or ask for some help to do this, and then it goes away. This does not work if things are not acctually ok.
I can see how this could look like anxiety is conserved, over a lot of diffrent datapoints, and I don’t know how someone can tell the diffrence untill they have experienced sufficient safety.
I think that case matches what I had in mind with the “anxiety is conserved” model. I don’t mean that nothing can ever make the anxiety go away; the point is that the things which one feels anxious about are not counterfactual to the emotion.
It’s generalized hangriness: if someone is hangry, they’ll feel angry about X, and if X is resolved they’ll quickly latch onto something else to be angry about; that’s the conservation. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up their hangriness; they just need to eat something.
Likewise, it sounds like you probably felt anxious a lot, and if one problem cleared up you’d feel anxious about something else. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up the anxiety; you apparently needed time with certain kinds of friends, just like a hangry person needs to eat. The anxiety was resistant to being cured by a generic safety net. You needed a particular thing which was not just safety in the literal sense of the word.
No, I don’t think what you say maches my experience. My anxiety was pointing straight at the thing I needed. Although I acknolage I did not put forward enough details for thus to be clear to you.
But it did not tell me how much I would need exactly. So it’s more like your hungry, and you eat some, and notice that you’re still hungry, and then start to wonder if eating is actually what you need, or this hunger feeling is about something else.
I don’t know what you mean by “generic safery net” or “safety in the literal sense”. I assumed based on context that we’re not talking about physical safety.
I mean things like: I’m not lonely and I expect to continue not to be lonely, because I found people I like who reliably also want me around.
I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.
What I’m getting from this is you want a partner who will push you like the military pushes recruits. Is that correct?
Not literally that; the military is not really optimizing for independent agency and competence. They’re optimizing to get people who will follow orders. And I don’t expect the military-style pressure to work well for developing independent agency and competence.
(Actually, I should also flag that what I want from partner isn’t necessarily to be pushed for independent agency and competence; joint agency and competence with them would also work.)
That does seem like the healthiest version, but it’s a tough one to emotionally communicate to a partner if they’re not already taking that stance themselves—attempts to push growth come across as criticism of current state, if they’re not already in that mindset. So, yeah, ideally one finds a partner who just reflexively takes that stance toward everything all the time. Especially since it’s the things which one is most insecure about which tend to end up being bottlenecks.
My view is that the value proposition of romantic relationships is that they fulfill the widespread human instinct to pair-bond. If you don’t feel an instinct to pair-bond, are a highly capable person, and already have reliable access to sex, childrearing opportunities, company, and other benefits people seek from relationships, then I don’t expect that relationships would offer much extra value for you.
Personally, I’ve always had a very strong, probably dysfunctionally strong, pair-bonding instinct, and this has been a serious impediment for me obtaining the concrete benefits of a romantic relationship. I get attached too easily to a partner, then stay too long in the relationship because of the simple fact that I’ve pair-bonded with them, despite the many shortcomings in the relationship. It also, paradoxically, impairs my ability to improve the relationship, because I get worried about losing even a highly problematic relationship. I would not wish on others the full extent of my strong drive to pair-bond or the high “value” it assigns to my existing relationships. Despite intellectually acknowledging this, I still feel that my relationships are meaningful and valuable. That’s how pair-bonding works.
It doesn’t surprise me that when people try to offer concrete explanations of the benefits they receive from relationships, that it seems to fall short of worthwhile. I think they’re trying to rationalize their pair-bonding instinct, and their attempts will only convince other people who already share that instinct.
My suspicion is that the way the pair-bonding instinct works is that it induces us to not only rationalize it, but it reorients our feelings and actions in order to support those rationalizations. Pair-bonding induces a sort of ideology about one’s relationship with one’s mate, complete with propaganda. The aim of the ideology is survival and reproduction: most people aren’t that capable, they really do need the support from their partner, and pair-bonding holds together mates in order to promote having children. And while this is all a very abstract, demoralizing and cynical-sounding view, I actually think it’s fine and reasonably healthy for the vast majority of people to live this way without worrying about it too much. Pair-bond the way you want, and enjoy the experience for what it is. Or, if you’re an unusual person, don’t pair-bond, and enjoy the better alternative you believe you’ve found for yourself.
One theory is that your experience with “love” is different from other people. Perhaps you’re conflating the “love/acceptance” cluster with “endorsement/satisfaction” cluster because you actually don’t feel much of the former?
You’ve previously said that you have “conditional love” for yourself. What’s your experience with this love, particularly in terms of the physical sensations in your body? (Wow, I really do sound woo now...) How does this compare to the immediate feeling of pleasure when good things happen to you, or the feeling of satisfaction after a productive day of work?
My personal experience with love, whether for myself or someone else, could be described pretty accurately as a warm and fuzzy feeling in my chest which is “oriented towards” the person. On the other hand, happiness feels excited/effervescent, and satisfaction feels grounded/solid. Both feel more oriented towards/centered on “an event in the world” rather than on a particular person (even if the event was directly caused by a person).
A huge value-add of romantic relationships for probably-most people is getting to feel the emotions of loving and being loved. Imagine asking someone “what’s the value proposition of ice cream? It’s bad for your teeth, makes you fat—it seems clearly net-negative!” In this case, it’s clear that pretty much the whole point of ice cream is the feeling of pleasure from eating it, which is its own terminal value. Romantic relationships are different because they involve many things that are positive even from an outside perspective, but focusing on those aspects alone kind of misses the point—the feeling tied to the relationship does a lot of heavy lifting.
Meta: thank you for this comment, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m trying to sort out—i.e. am I missing some standard emotion, and if so am I missing it innately or because I haven’t been engaging with people in the right way? (Or perhaps I am experiencing but haven’t consciously noticed it; I personally am pretty confident I would have noticed, but from other peoples’ perspective that should probably be a live hypothesis.)
You know how when masculine men encounter each other for the first time often they do “the nod”? It feels a lot like doing the nod, but with myself.
The nod normally is pretty instinctive, it feels like a sort of mutual recognition and respect. It’s tied to dominance somehow, though there’s more to it than that; sort of like a recognition that someone can hold their own and possibly be responsible for others, as opposed to needing someone else to be responsible for them? (I’ll flag that I think the sort of people who don’t do the nod themselves often seem to mean a different thing by “respect”, and I’m honestly unsure whether they even experience “respect” in the sense that two people doing the nod experience it.)
Physically, it comes with a reflex to stand straight and hold eye contact. There’s a bit of tension to it.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a time I’ve had that sort of experience. I’ve definitely experienced love-in-the-sense-of-limerance (like e.g. a crush), but I’m pretty sure you’re talking about something else.
I didn’t read anything in this reply that sounded like it was probably the feeling/experience I associate with The Thing. (Whereas I internally nodded in recognition reading Caleb’s comment.)
I think that an extremely productive and high trust “business-partnership” with someone can look very close to a high value romantic relationship (minus some symbols) but lack the internal experience of warm-fuzzy oriented-at-other-as-a-person thing I think Caleb was gesturing at. Which sounds super useful and I want people around me like that. But that’s not enough for romantic partnership. (Or maybe even deep friendship)
Does the warm-fuzzy thing involve a literal feeling of warmth in your chest?
Take this as a very noisy sample: Maybe? Sometimes? I think...no? Gun to my head: its more literally like an ache maybe but with very positive valence? It comes with a significant compulsion to express it (e.g. saying “fuck, I love you”) and in ~all examples I’ve seen of people saying they were feeling “warmly” about a person their bodies and faces move the same way this feeling moves mine.
You’re the second person to tell me it’s more like an ache. That exact word.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt that thing. My new working hypothesis is that I have near-zero oxytocin production, and have literally never felt this whole cluster of emotions around “connection”, non-limerence-”love”, or any of the weaker forms of it either. That would explain a lot.
If you have near-0 oxytocin production, my prediction is things like physical touch, hugs from people you care about, and cuddling with a romantic partner, would all be significantly less pleasant for you than for someone who has a more typical hormonal profile. The thing that most reliably triggers the “warm fuzzy” feeling I associate with love (which could also be described as a sensation focused in my chest that has ache-like elements) is cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact after sex. So what you feel, if anything, when engaging in cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact, would be informative here, without having to use a nasal spray.
I also note that it’s easy to think I may not be experiencing the same things others have experienced, and difficult to dispel those thoughts because people’s descriptions are often vague. I’ve stopped worrying about whether my experience is typical or atypical, and focus on whether I like it or not, and the same question gets asked of my partner
It has long been clear to me that other people get something from hugs that I don’t; I mostly find them an excellent tool for helping other people feel cared-for. I’m pretty sure I get a normal endorphin response from touch, e.g. cuddling and especially dancing, but the endorphin response is a separate thing from oxytocin; I’m unsure whether what I’m experiencing is (just endorphin) or (endorphin + oxytocin). Cuddling after sex is pleasant, but another place where it has long been clear to me that other people get something out of it that I don’t (or possibly other people get quantitatively a lot more of whatever pleasantness I feel from it).
That is mostly what I’ve done historically, but it is strategically relevant to figure out this part of my world-model.
One big example application: when it comes to dating, there’s a pareto frontier of (kinds of relationships I could get and how valuable I’d find them) vs (how much effort it would take), and I notice that nearly all of that curve looks to me like the value is not worth the effort, across many different types of relationships. Strategically, I want to make very different choices in worlds where:
I am underestimating the value, vs
I historically “do something wrong” such that I could get a lot more value out of relationships but haven’t, vs
I am innately missing some giant chunk of relationship-value and should therefore generally expect to not get as much value from relationships as other people do, vs
I face unusual value-tradeoffs when it comes to relationships, and should therefore be specializing in a specific way in order to get a valuable-to-me relationship at reasonable effort expenditure.
That last one especially requires understanding my own values and how my values compare to others’ (to figure out likely areas of relative advantage/disadvantage) and the distribution of values of those available on the dating market.
Of course the usual approach would just be to take lots of shots on goal and see what sticks, but that makes a lot more sense for people for whom a “normal” relationship is very high value. That’s not the case for me; the EV of just trying a lot looks clearly negative across nearly the entire curve of possibilities. (I say “nearly the entire curve” because there are basically-zero-effort options.)
Disagree. It makes sense if the relationship you want is very high value to you. The relationship you want doesn’t have to be normal. Provided the end-state is high value and each shot is cheap, it works out that you should take lots of shots. You filter for what you want in the early stages, so that each attempt is not very costly.
Now, if you want an abnormal relationship and you don’t want it that much, then yeah, go for the basically 0 effort options.
Disagree. The cost of many shots is strongly dominated by acquisition costs, not by the effort of filtering.
This is importantly different from the low-effort regime, in which putting zero effort into acquisition is the whole point. Normally for men IIUC, and certainly for me, the occasional romantic opportunity pops up organically from one’s social circle. But if one needs to cast a wider net than that, the options are basically (a) get involved in new social circles, or (b) get into the more liquid parts of the dating market, e.g. the apps, or historically bars/clubs, or singles events. Both of those options require very high investments (at least to actually get any interest from the liquid dating markets, as a guy).
Hm. I’m trying to put together several things I know into a coherent picture, and they don’t fit. This suggests that maybe the dating/sexual market in your area is very different from mine, or maybe I’m missing or misunderstanding something else important.
1) You are able to satisfy your sexual needs and then some, without any long term commitment to your sexual partners, in a “basically 0 effort regime”, from within your own social network.
2) But getting enough people in your pipeline to find a good relationship prospect would be high effort.
3) In your local area, men significantly outnumber women, which makes #2 harder.
4) It’s possible you have significant social blind spots which I would predict would make it harder for you to find sexual partners than the average person (not long ago you weren’t certain flirting was even a real thing people do).
On my mental model of how these things usually work, if you’ve got lots of willing sexual partners without much effort, that means you have lots of candidate relationship partners at the same level of effort. The Venn diagram isn’t a single circle, but there’s significant overlap.
Anyway, I’m likely misunderstanding something important, but here’s what I was thinking when I suggested it should be possible to take lots of shorts with relatively low effort: There should be a middle ground between “putting zero effort into acquisition” and “requiring very high investments.” I was thinking of three regimes, zero, low, and high effort, as follows:
Zero effort: Take opportunities as they arise organically, but do not seek them out.
Low effort: Do some basic things that are likely to be high return for the effort, to increase your chances of a match. I had in mind clearly articulating what you want and what you offer to a partner, and that you are flexible about what you’re willing to offer, to the extent this is true. (an aside: many people have a mental model that if two people don’t want the same things out of a relationship, they’re not a match for each other, but this seems incorrect to me. What needs to match is what I want and what the other person is offering, and what they want and what I’m offering, not what I want and what they want—although us being very similar to each other in terms of what we want does simplify things. But I can increase my viable matches, all else equal and without settling for things I don’t want, by being willing to accommodate a wide variety of wants in a partner.). Then, when you’ve clearly articulated what you value in a partner and what you offer that is of value, check it with some women to see you’ve not inadvertently said something that will be misinterpreted—perhaps some of the people who are willing to have non-committed sex with you would also be well-disposed enough towards you to check your work and validate the accuracy of what you’re saying from an outside perspective? I recall you saying you didn’t have female friends who you interact with outside of a dating context, back a while ago, which is why I suggest this rather than checking with a friend. Once you’ve got a really solid articulation of what you want and what you offer, actively use your social network to find a match, rather than taking opportunities as they arise organically. Tell your friends and acquaintances to recursively tell their friends and acquaintances you’re looking, with a link to the articulation of what you’re looking for. For the more distant social connections, consider offering a bounty, or having some way to track who has put their reputation behind you being a good human who tries to give his partners a good experience. Put some effort into reminding your social connections that you’re still looking, but use word-of-mouth rather than long hours on apps.
That was a long paragraph, but really, if you hope to find a partner with specific rare characteristics without it being a matter of blind luck, you’ll have to do the work of clearly articulating what you want and what you offer, and “tell your friends you’re looking” isn’t hard.
High effort: Try every method known, put forth full effort as if finding a relationship partner is an important priority.
The missing piece is that I have a basically-100% retention rate, at least insofar as I want to. I don’t have lots of willing sexual partners; those opportunities come along at a trickle. But those who do, are consistently eager for more. That doesn’t require long term commitment on my part, it just requires them to keep wanting more.
My friends do know that I’m looking and what I’m looking for (as far as I’ve figured that out myself); the consensus response from them is “oof, that’s tough”. Relying on friends is a fine strategy when the characteristics one wants are, say, 1-in-10 rare (bearing in mind that they’ll probably be more rare than that among single people because adverse selection), up to maybe 1-in-100. My fermi estimates say that the things I’d be willing to marry for are more like 1-in-10k at most, and probably more rare than that.
Ok, that does clarify my mistake, and I don’t have a lot to add. Except: it seems to me like the smarter someone is, the more willing they will be to trust their own judgment and ask sensible questions rather than just say “nope” if being asked to do something different than a standard relationship template. And also, the smarter someone is, the more likely they are able to manage the complications of something like nonmonogamy, or various relationship or personality quirks you might have. So, conditional on your suitable match being quite smart, the base rates of things like “will accept nonmonogamy” in the population in general won’t apply. In general, make sure you’re doing chained conditional probabilities, not multiplying your estimate of various traits in the population to get a small number. Weirdnesses correlate! :). And if your ideal partner is a genius alignment researcher or something similar, your geographic location is already doing a lot of filtering for you. But, probably you and your friends have accounted for all that and still got “oof, that’s tough” as the result, so… good luck! You seem good, and I hope things work out for you.
Ah, ok. My experience was similar. For the first part of my life I was quite insecure and felt that I needed to work on myself first before attempting to partner with someone. That part is probably not similar, and may not be relevant. Once I got myself in order, I found that relationships seemed like a lot of effort for not very much benefit. It seemed to me like a lot of people were chasing after sex as if masturbation was not an option (I mean, sex is better, but not that much better, to the point where it would be worth it to put a significant portion of my available time and energy towards chasing it as a sole motivator) or validation (I speculated that people who hadn’t done the work on themselves and their own emotional state that I had might feel a greater need for external validation than I do), or… something else I hadn’t identified? Anyway, I went the low-effort route. How I operationalized that was, I’d consider dating someone if they showed an interest, but wasn’t going out looking for dates. And that did lead to several multi-year relationships, which mostly confirmed my sense that in retrospect they had been more effort than they were worth.
In the standard story, this is where the author goes “and then I met my current partner and everything was different, there were sunshine and rainbows and I finally understood what I had been missing, I felt something I’d never felt before, or something”. But this is real life, so it doesn’t follow that path, obviously. But, then I met my current partner, and the downsides in my other relationships basically don’t exist in this one, the benefits are significantly greater than the costs. What I had figured were properties of most people, were actually properties of dysfunctional people (which… may be most people?), and she just… didn’t have those issues. We get along great, when we have a disagreement we can talk about it like adults who are on the same team, when we need something we say so and then we each get what we need from the other. She feels like she’s high-maintenance because she occasionally struggles and I get to give her emotional support in those times, and I’m like “you do not understand what the words ‘high maintenance’ even mean, I could do this all day, it is actively pleasant to be helpful and appreciated for helping”.
Anyway, your strategic situation is different from mine because your values and personality are different from mine, but I am one data point of a person who thought that the effort required to have a relationship was generally not worth the cost, learned that with the right person this isn’t true, but didn’t have some kind of storybook epiphany or emotional conversion to a different sort of person. My advice would be, filter hard, and only invest in a relationship when it seems like it might be worth it, even if that’s rare or doesn’t ever happen. But my advice might be wrong for you.
That is indeed one of the points on the pareto curve where I’m like “yup, that would be nice, but the expected effort to get there is not enough for the payoff, for me”. Filtering hard means one has to go through a lot of candidates, and I’d need to make large changes to my life and probably invest thousands of hours in order to do that. (Bear in mind I’m in the Bay Area and my social circle is mostly rationalists; the supermajority of my current social circle is male and the whole geographical area is disproportionately male. So I’m not just facing unusually low benefits, but also unusually high costs.) Especially since that’s not a value prop I’d be willing to go monogamous and get married over, which would likely be a deal breaker for most such women.
For now, the low effort route is at least enough to get my sexual needs met and then some, even when I’m being transparent about not wanting much more than that with the women in question. (To be clear, I’m definitely not one of those guys who will kick a girl out as soon as he’s done, but I am explicit about not having any intention of climbing the relationship ladder past the lots-of-sex-and-some-fun-outings point.) That much, at least, is clearly net positive for me.
Well! This can be tested (Maybe.)
I know folks who spray oxytocin up their nose. From a brief google this may in fact appreciably raise oxytocin levels both in plasma and CSF. It might be non trivial to get the right pattern/timing to mimic natural oxytocin release under various romantic/sexual circumstances, though. Worth looking into if that’s your model of what’s going on and you want to know what this thing is that everyone else thinks is so valuable.
Yeah, I ordered a test kit, so will have some data in a couple months. (Turn time is very slow.) Oxytocin levels apparently vary pretty quickly, so it won’t be a definitive update, but probably strong evidence in one direction or the other.
As for the nose spray… I intend to be real careful about any experimentation. I know y’all think this stuff is Morally Good and all that, but it sure sounds effectively like a drug which is likely to be extremely addictive, overwrite my values like crazy, and have a large cognitive impact of some sort. But yeah, probably a good idea to try it once or twice just to understand WTF everyone is talking about, assuming this whole hypothesis is correct.
Have you considered the possibility that you are a psychopath? (I think that word may be negative by definition, but there isn’t really a better one, so please read it with a neutral connotation instead.)
I am very curious about what would happen with the oxytocin nasal spray, and I do feel that having more love in the world is generally good and that it is an important part of a “meaningful human experience.” Also I would feel vindicated if you were like “OHHH I get it now, the warm fuzzy feeling is real!” And I don’t really expect anything bad would happen if you take it, since apparently the effects of oxytocin are quite subtle. So I kinda hope you do this experiment.
All that being said, I suppose you are probably pretty high up in terms of “expected good being done for the world” and a priori maybe I should expect random changes to be harmful rather than helpful? But it seems not crazy to think that this particular intervention could be good for your impact—like maybe a high-level understanding of what everyone else feels could make you better at politics, insofar as that is necessary for your work. Maybe a realization that other people have inherent value would make you even more motivated to work on alignment. Although I feel like oxytocin is probably not powerful enough to have much effect in this way either.
Jhana meditation probably has a much stronger effect than oxytocin, but is also perhaps more controlled because it’s all coming from your body, meaning it has the ability to easily come out of it if it realizes things are happening that it doesn’t want. You could do this with Jhourney, but you are likely self-motivated enough to do it by yourself if you really want to, maybe by listening to the recordings from Rob Burbea’s jhana retreat. Meditation takes a lot more time than oxytocin though, I’m not at all confident it’s worth it for you although it definitely was for me. My impression from hearsay and experience is that if meditation changes your values, it generally does so by making them more coherent rather than changing them to something entirely different, but take this with a gigantic grain of salt, idk what I’m talking about.
I have considered that before, and pretty confident I’m not. I definitely wince when I see people in pain, I feel bad when I inconvenience other people, I empathize when people are going through something which seems emotionally difficult to me (though admittedly I often roll my eyes when I think others’ emotions are clearly overblown), etc.
Oh, interesting! Yeah, I guess all of these things are possible without feeling “love” as such. My everyday experience is not so different, I feel all the things you described but don’t often have strong feelings of love (but am interested in more).
I’m wondering what would happen if you tried to focus on and describe the physical sensations associated with these things you mentioned. You mentioned limerence earlier—I’m also interested in what that’s like, since I think it can be pretty phenomenologically similar to love.
Good questions.
Cuddling or cuddling-adjacent hugs/dances sometimes induce a feeling of peace and relaxation; physically my muscles relax and mentally my thoughts quiet and my attention is just on the contact. Depending on the context, it also sometimes come with an intention to wrap the other person up and keeping them safe so they can just relax and be at peace for a bit.
The physical sensation of seeing people in pain is a need to squirm; the corresponding part of my body tightens up and then moves around a bit with the muscles tight? Also wanting to look away.
Both when people are going through something emotionally difficult or when I inconvenience other people, I feel a sort of empathetic sadness. Like there’s a weight pulling down when I pay attention to them, if I’m being poetic about it.
Also when someone has very red eyes and I look them in the eyes, my eyes tear up in response. I’ve found that imagining someone with very red eyes is a reliable way to make myself cry. More generally, I tear up when I direct my attention at someone who’s crying, but it’s the eyes which have the strongest effect.
As for limerence… I’ve only felt the initial hook of limerence toward one person in over ten years, and I mentally shut it down for the most part before it could spiral out of control. Specifically, the limerence involved a strong feeling of excitement, in a way which clearly differed from realistic expectations, so I habitually responded by reciting more realistic expectations whenever it came up. The result is that the feeling of limerence still pokes me whenever that person is nearby, but I mostly don’t think about them otherwise. Physically, it’s similar to the feeling of anticipating a really fun event, though more nervousness mixed in, like I’m about to ride a roller coaster. Also a sensory pull toward the person, like most of my attention is directed at them.
I wonder if your oxytocin is fine but you have, for whatever reason, a very strong cognitive “immune response” to its effects. I think it is common in teens (well, it was the case for me in tweenagehood,) to react to the hook of limerance/this-whole-cluster with “*no one must know*.” Followed in my case by trying not to dwell on it. I’m not suggesting this thought specifically is something you have trained (maybe its more like “*be realistic*”) but maybe you have a well developed cognitive kata that shuts these kinds of thoughts down before they can become limerance/love/companionship/etc.
The limerence one is intentionally there because the emotion makes obviously false claims. If I have anything like that in place for companionship or love more generally, I don’t know about it, and I’d be pretty surprised if that were the case. I would expect such a thing to feel-from-the-inside like either an “ugh” field or an anxious/stressed feeling or some other unpleasant feeling making me avoid the thing, and I don’t have any of those around the sorts of situations which normally induce feelings of companionship/love/etc.
Fair enough and well taken. (I uh...don’t think it’s like written on the atoms that this stuff is Good tbc. I value it very highly and it seems like a big part of the human culture.)
Some reasons that occur to me to be less worried than you seem:
It does sound to me like you already are interested in connecting with people more deeply
People fall in and out of love so it’s not that permanent an effect
I don’t think Ive heard of anyone getting addicted to supplemental oxytocin, and while lots of people say they want more love in their life it doesn’t seem like much of a addict-compulsion since most people are also not doing much to make that happen
That said, caution seems extremely reasonable, in general and especially from your perspective here.
I’m more worried about a major shift on the interest-in-people-vs-things psychological axis.
...ah. When you put it that way.....
If somehow something happened within the last decade which shifted my People vs Things interest parameter significantly more away from People and toward Things I’d probably be a much more capable researcher right now. (Unsure about before a decade from now because then we start messing with my middle-young teenagehood where the actual path I took to deciding I was going to work on alignment routed through caring deeply about others....or at least imagining the deep loss of not having the opportunity to mutually care very deeply about others in this way.)
I’d also not have or be many things which I currently reflectively value highly, but that’s a me thing :)
I might, if I meditated on it, press a button that goes back in time to perform that intervention back in my early college years, (and I’d grieve the decision more than I’ve grieved probably anything,) to increase the chance that our work is decisively counterfactual. I’m so glad that such a button does not exist.
(Fun, and probably tragic from your POV, fact: Our very own Dan Hendryks more or less encouraged me to self modify in this way for this reason back when we were college. I shook my head and laughed at the time. Now I feel more complicatedly.)
Point being: Yup. That sure is a life-influencing personality-parameter. Concern is super merited.
Yeah I was sort of surprised you were doing it at all for that reason.
I don’t know if that showed up in prior discussions, but I think many people just value relationship for the sake of relationship. Say, you’re growing up thinking “I want to have a nice healthy family”. Even if from the outside it doesn’t look like you’re getting that much from your relationship, it might still have a very high value for you because it’s exactly the thing you wanted.
Another thing that comes to mind is, ehm, love. Some people are just very happy because they make others happy. So even an asymmetrical relationship that makes the other side very happy and doesn’t bring much visible-from-the-outside value for you could be very good, if you value their happiness a lot.
I agree strongly with much of this and it still feels like “a mutual happy promise of, ‘I got you’” still mostly captures it for me. Like, IMO a support which pushes me to become better and stronger is kinda what I meant when I phrased the thing as being “I got you.” When a person is less sure of themself or more afraid of abandonment or has whatever other insecurities that people-who-arent-you have, then the strength-giving action can be affirmation/acceptance. (Not endorsement, acceptance.) And with that strength one might move forward and grow.
If I imagine a romantic partner takes deep joy in my joy/triumphs and is thereby motivated to intervene in ways that bring me more joy/triumph, it doesn’t feel like there is much missing there. That’s the good shit. That’s what “I got you” was supposed to mean, I think. (And I won’t claim that growth is a universal value but I sure take joy and a sense of triumph in my own growth so an ideal partner for me would help me with that as I help them with what they value...which is likely to be similar if I’ve chosen well.)
Notes:
I feel warm and fuzzy about being with people who take this stance toward me even if they aren’t very capable of making good on it very often. I like them and want them around. Putting energy into them at the expense of potential other who could deliver on the Good Thing in addition to wanting it, is very plausibly a mistake. I mention it to point out that this sort of feeling could cause confusion when you go looking for the dynamic in partnered folks. People can be instinctively chasing this ideal and even think they have it if they don’t distinguish their partner’s stance from their partners ability to deliver on it.
I think of this as the aspirational ideal. I think that to the extent that a romantic partnership fails at this dynamic, the relationship is worse for it. I think that for maybe most people, it is very hard to find a close approximation of this in part because they haven’t named it and don’t totally understand what they’re looking for, but are nonetheless usually attracted to approximations of or signals in the way of this. (This applies to people looking for partnership. People can also look for other forms of relationships, but they won’t have what I think is the main value of a partnership/romantic-relationship.)
This is going to be a comment on the recent spate of johnswentworth-introspection posts as a whole.
I
It’s often interesting to get a look into someone else’s mind. I’ve enjoyed this sequence a lot.
II
A lot of what you’ve said has been kinda familiar to me. I think whichever personality vector separates you from the median person, I’m on a similar vector. I think it’s somewhere on the fringes of rat-personalities but not an outlier among them in the way that it is amongst the general population.
III
I think you’re further from median than me (around 2 times, 90% CI 0.75-5) which might have made it easier for you to identify parts of that vector which I hadn’t on my own, but that I can recognize in myself.
IV
If I have any advice at all to give, as someone who experiences similar things to you, it would be this: you are weird on a very deep level, let go of being deeply normal.
Obviously there are innumerate benefits to being shallowly normal, and you should try and do those (it’s also totally possible to be deeply weird yet shallowly normal) but if your brain gets nothing out of romantic relationships then that’s probably just the way you are.
V
Or maybe you just have some kind of obscure mineral or hormone deficiency or you lack some skill like properly perceiving body language or something, you never know.
Well, since you quite literally begged the question: what are you sexual kinks?
NSFW, obviously
The way I worded it until recently was that I’m turned on by a woman struggling. Just a couple days ago Aella used the phrase “deeply, primarily aroused by women in distress” (not describing me specifically), which might actually be a more accurate description of my sexuality than anything I’ve come up with.
So for instance, peak hotness for me is holding my partner’s nose and mouth so she can’t breath, pounding her until the haven’t-breathed-in-a-while panic response kicks in for her, then holding her down and fucking her a little longer while she’s panicking. Super-hot variations on that include:
The game “you can breathe when I’m satisfied”
Ordering her not to physically struggle, and then enjoying the mental dominance as she struggles against herself.
Other fun things which scratch the itch to various extents include choking (either from a hand around the neck or a cock in the throat), making her hold a certain position for a very long time (I usually go for 30 minutes to an hour per round not counting foreplay, so e.g. making her hold her legs for most of that time can do the trick), standard sadism (like hard biting or spanking), standard CNC, squeezing nerve clusters, or just holding/tying her body in a position where she’s straining against it.
On a meta note: I think there’s a lot of alpha in people talking online about stuff they don’t usually share with anyone besides partners or very close friends, IF the person has the writing skills to not make the delivery too cringey AND can handle at least some less-than-maximally-positive responses. That’s part of the motivation for this post and the empathy posts, and it’s a big part of why I begged that particular question. I’ve been actively trying to lean more into baring my soul online.
And to be clear, I think the alpha in this is at least as much for the author as for the audience. Something feels healthy about just opening up to the world about everything, as long as the world doesn’t respond too negatively. Sort of like the most-generalized version of coming out of the closet.
You’re disgusting monsters, both of you.
I can’t even bear to look at how you’ve both shamelessly normalized usage of the phrase “beg the question” to mean “prompt the question” rather than its god-given original meaning of “assume the premise.”
Shame on you.
Oh and nice kinks.
My use of “beg the question”, as opposed to the official way, is the objectively superior use, and I will die on this hill:
Like, come on, it’s the natural English interpretation of what that phrase is supposed to mean. I am (usually metaphorically) begging you to ask the question.
Cat’s already out the bag on this one. Give in to the dark side. We have cookies.
There’s already a good term for the other meaning: “assume the conclusion”. This tells you pretty clearly what it means. You don’t have to think to figure it out. A child can understand what it means.
I actually doubt people frequently assume the conclusion without realizing it? But possibly this is me being weird and not doing it a lot. Even in math, I feel like it’s blatantly obvious when you do so, so that the closest you get is having you math-proof-babbler only be able to come up with things that assume the conclusion, which then get recognized as obviously not working for that reason.
Ok. Well in the spirit of responding to generalized coming out of the closet, I have possibly rude questions.
Do you...have sex with women that you care about?
If so, how does the desire for distress interact with the caring? Aren’t they...almost exactly opposites? Or is that not how it is for you? Do you “turn down the volume” one one to turn up the volume on the other? Are you expressing caring by causing someone to struggle?
Good questions.
Yes, I definitely care about the women I have sex with, and most other people who I interact with significantly. Even when I intend to keep a relationship relatively “casual”, I still generally provide a fair bit of the more intimacy-flavored aspects of a relationship—i.e. generally paying attention to what her day-to-day emotional experience is like, what parts of her life or herself she’s anxious or insecure about, etc, and generally trying to help her grow stronger without being too pushy or steamrolly about it.
There’s more than one way the desire for distress and caring can synthesize, for me. One prototypical synthesis: deeply wanting her to come out of the experience better and stronger. Indeed, that’s the one promise I make upfront on a first date: my first priority is to make sure she leaves a better and stronger person. When it comes to the sex, a “become better and stronger” case I enjoy is when some part of her wants the sort of experience which arouses me, it’s something she knows a part of her wants but which she hasn’t embraced often, and she comes (
and comes, and...) out of the experience with her parts/values more whole and integrated. There’s a lot of gentleness and curiosity around it, giving her space to understand herself, though it doesn’t necessarily look like gentleness aesthetically (e.g. “forcing” her to tell me her darker fantasies). Of course the flip side, on my part, is having to be very careful not to project or suggest such a part into a woman who does not, in fact, want it. But that’s a special case of a skill I’ve practiced a lot in many contexts.Another way things might come together: it’s centrally about doing these things to a woman who wants these things done to her. And in that frame, there’s an element of… taking pride in seeing actual humans’ actual values for what they are, and embracing them, and celebrating them, rather than pretending that humans’ values are necessarily some gentler or “friendlier” thing. Like, we’re both embracing what we really want, together, and ignoring whatever background social conditioning might have said otherwise.
Also I should mention that my kinks aren’t necessarily obligate; the extent to which I need this particular thing in order to finish varies over time and I haven’t worked out the relevant factors yet. And I’m generally pretty ok with just fucking a while and not finishing, that happens pretty frequently, and I don’t need my kinks engaged just to keep it up (unless I’m very stressed or tired, or it’s like round 3 or 4 and we’ve basically just been going at it for several hours).
NSFW question
How do you maintain breath control on someone who is paniking.
I’ve tried a bit of hoding someones mouth and nose, from both sides of the experience, and haven’t figured out a way that acctually stops the person from breathing if they try hard enough.
The main answer is that I haven’t had much issue with that, so I don’t know what I’m doing differently. Having large hands and some muscle are unfortunately obvious hypotheses for what might be relevant. Physically, I usually have all my body weight on my partner, and significant weight over my arms holding her head down, with my elbows to the side of the head to keep it relatively still.
This thread needs a bit of counterbalance.
One can consider an alternative in bonding & control play; lots to explore with no brain cells at risk of dying in the process.
If one does not want to consider bonding, maybe a first aid course is due or a refresher would be fitting.
bondage play*
In the post and comments, you’ve said that you’re reflectively stable, in the sense of endorsing your current values. In combination with the sadistic kinks/values described above, that raises some questions:
What exactly stops you from inflicting suffering on people, other than the prospect of social or legal repercussions? Do you have some values that countervail against the sadism? If yes, what are they, and how do you reconcile them with the sadism? [1]
Asking partly because: I occasionally run into sadistic parts in myself, but haven’t found a way to reconcile them with my more empathetic parts, so I usually just suppress/avoid the sadistic parts. And I’d like to find a way to reconcile/integrate them instead.
I have empathetic parts too. The main reconciliation is simply that lots of women want exactly what I want to do to them in bed; I am fortunate in that regard. Indeed, demand for my tastes probably outstrips supply by a very wide margin; from my perspective it’s a shame that the mating markets are so wildly inefficient.
I’ve found it difficult to imagine being in a romantic relationship I appreciate since becoming hardcore about worldsavey stuff. there are just too many things that would have to match. intense motivation is definitely one of them.
However, I’m finding your posts on this to be uncomfortable to read too closely, like my brain intuitively thinks there’s an injured thinking pattern that I’m inclined to generate and am not yet improved on, something like a brain fragment demanding agency in ways that don’t pay for themselves, demanding I already have solved a problem that isn’t being solved easily. people helping me render my agency properly would be quite welcome but this sort of self-demand, a conditional self-disgust that labels some states “you aren’t even worth defending as a worth-carrying hollow husk if you can’t provide what’s needed to win”, feels horrible and I want it gone. I want to get rid of the thing that tells me I am terrible when there is terrible out there that I haven’t solved and replace it with something that tells me the map of how to get rid of the terrible out there, and rates my current action gently but consistently in terms of how well I’m doing at fixing problems in the world. if I have to feel underwater in states of failure, as if I’ve lost the right to love myself and should make arbitrarily large sacrifices until back in the loved state, then there are brain parts that want to get in internal fights demanding the self-valuation be turned back on.
and this is definitely not a well calibrated state of mind to be in, the one that I am in in recent years; the current pattern is resulting in me doing far less than I could because I feel bad for being imperfect as soon as I think about something hard.
...perhaps we should clarify though. by “love” you mean something like “value the existence and presence of the person, in a way where you’d put part of your growth energy and strategizing towards consequentialism that results in the person ending up in a situation where their wants and needs are satisfied, and feel an internal sensation of value satisfaction when knowing the person’s values (wants, needs, etc) are satisfied”? because having that for myself is what I mean that I am often lacking when I say my self-love is iffy. That’s the thing I would also want a partner to have for me.
I will say though. you say you want intense power-couple type partner, if any partner; that resonates. I’d want to date someone on or above my level, interested in dating me and sees me as a valuable investment despite my not having reached maximum level yet. that’s how I’d phrase the thing jacob was talking about. they’d accept me into their value function despite my not being perfect yet—they’d have growth mindset about me and be able to appreciate my trajectory without seeing me as unworthy of connection because of fixed-mindset evaluation. also, this would need to be the same in reverse; I would value them as a person, and value our connection, because of how they already are, such that they’d be fun, nice, and most importantly, augmenting, to be around, even without additional growth. I would also find them not additionally growing and working hard at it to be a deal breaker, and would expect them to feel the same in return. but if they can’t see me as an already-nonzero-valuable fixer-upper[1], I’d find that upsetting. (not least because I think it’s objectively false.)
then there’s the whole different problem that I’d think anyone who wants to date me in my current circumstances, with the amount of energy I’d want to spend on connection, probably doesn’t have high enough standards to be someone I’d want to date. I could start finding someone intrinsically-valued by the standards above, and I’d probably just get sad and keep caring about them but not form a relationship or spend my time on them. I’d want to save goodness from cancer, and anyone capable of doing that wouldn’t match up with the particular set of tradeoffs I’m making to do it.
[1] (where flaws include, eg, not being a planetary mind yet, and also sometimes sleeping too much, or avoiding doing hard math I really need to get around to so I can maybe push work like yours forward ever at all dammit)
Reading this post, the sentence that jumped out was “I’m generally reflectively stable about my own values“
Isn’t this an extremely strong claim? I have no idea how to modify a person or a machine to have reflectively stable values without paying essentially all the utils to value drift- I thought this was an open problem in alignment.
Anyways, I’d assume that typical people aren’t close to reflectively stable, particularly around love and relationships, and that any full-send attempt to become stable would have an outcome scored very poorly by their current values.
This is indeed a moderately unusual thing for a human, and most people would indeed be ill-advised to try to become reflectively stable; there is a right way to do it (which should probably be the topic of some posts at some point), but most peoples’ models of their own values are far too confused to do it correctly if they just directly try. Most likely, they’d end up trying to shoehorn themselves into what-they-think-their-values-are, without actually listening to the underlying parts of themselves where their actual values come from, and then eventually end up depressed.
That said, the version of reflective stability I’m talking about is not an open problem in alignment. The alignment version is about keeping values stable under heavy self-modification; I indeed do not know how to heavily modify my brain while keeping my values stable (and I am accordingly paranoid about drugs which fuck with the reward system). What I’m talking about in the post is merely endorsing my own values and wanting to keep them, which is a standard property of utility maximizers (though that is not to claim that I am necessarily well modeled as a utility maximizer).
Based on your posts, this is totally the kind of thing that I thought you were likely to not be doing, so the fact that you were able to generate this sentence makes me feel better
Notes of spiralings of thinking; feels like you feel like you scoped the whole terrain of the whys/why nots of (romantic) partnerships, but through scoping you lose/lost sight of the experientials.
“I, pencil” is nice.
~ edit: compressed ~
What was it?
This section of the Core Pathways of Aging post has a summary with links.
Systematic Bias Towards Perceiving Relationships as Beneficial
The human brain is heavily biased. Ask a parent how good it was to have a child and they often say “Having a child was the best thing ever”. There is a circuit in their brain that rewards them in that moment where they reflect.
However, if you have people rate every hour how engaging it is to handle their child, you get a score comparable to household chores.
Probably the brain also is biased to mainly retrieve positive memories when reflection, and make them seem more positive than they actually where.
Nice trick evolution! Somebody who thinks about whether to have another child is much more likely to want another if their perception is skewed in this way.
All the neural machinery involved in relationships, especially romantic ones, is all about reproduction. At least from the perspective of evolution.
People track their romantic relationship as a property of reality. And usually they perceive this property as something positive to be preserved. Optimizing reality to preserve the relationship is probably advantagous evolutionary. Staying close together and talking a lot (which can give optimization relevant information) seems useful for the task of succesfully raising offspring.
Conclusion: It is likely that there is a systematic bias that makes people perceive relationships as more positive upon reflection, than they actually are.
That is not to say that relationships are bad, just that we shouldn’t be suprised if somebody says that they think their realtionship is high value when it’s not.
Just a random thought:
I like the general sound of “growing stronger and better”, but in real life you often have limited resources and competing goals. Like, you could get better at X, or better at Y, but you can’t (with the same time and resources) become equally better both at X and at Y.
Sometimes the problem with people who push you to grow stronger is that they decide to push you to get stronger at X, while you would prefer to get stronger at Y instead. But from their perspective, X simply is better than Y, and you are not doing your best. Ironically, someone who doesn’t insist that you do your best (from their perspective) could be a better partner to help you do your best (from your perspective).
Yup, that’s definitely a thing I track.
The flip side of this is that people often “decide” that they don’t want to grow stronger at Y because Y seems hard, or isn’t as rewarding to work on, or some such. But if someone forces them to grow stronger at Y, in hindsight they will endorse working at Y rather than X.
… and of course it’s also possible for someone to be wrong when they think that’s what’s going on and try to push their friend/partner accordingly.
You being ashamed of something doesn’t necessarily mean that you think it’s bad. Maybe you think it’s good, but fear that you will be unable to find other people who agree with you. i.e. you might diverge from the norm and fear that people won’t understand and that they will judge you for it.
But I’m getting the feeling that, to you, there’s not much difference between the norm and yourself? It feels as if you’ve fused with the general consensus and the values associated with your intellectual purpuits, to the point that they’ve replaced your own values and your own opinions about yourself. So that your subjective “good (enjoyment and love)”, and the external “good (utility and progress)” have become one.
From more objective perspectives, this is “good”, it doesn’t really seem to bring disadvantages with it. But I personally find a lot of fulfillment in the social aspects of life, the whole package deal with all the problems and disadvantages.
By the way, there are things that I don’t like in a partner, and think that I don’t mind but still recognize as bad, and these are different categories. I wouldn’t want my partner to spend time around druggies, but I wouldn’t turn down a girl because she had trauma, even though trauma is “bad”. As long as it’s something she’d work on in the long run, it wouldn’t worry me.
I don’t think you’re missing anything – you’ve got all the pieces, at least, within the posts you’ve written and the comments you’ve read on them, it’s just putting the pieces together into an answer that feels complete to you.
Your sense of what the right answer here is shouldn’t be contingent upon “would I find this value proposition as valuable as they do?” being answered in the affirmative. You are not “most people”, and shouldn’t expect to respond the same way the model you have of “most people” would. The question is not “how would I feel?” but “how do they feel?”. This links back to doing the “I am inhabiting the perspective I imagine them to have” version of empathy rather than the “I am putting myself in their situation” version.
Inhabit their frame of mind fully as best you can, and see if your mental model of them generates an emotional response high in value. Then adjust your mental model of them in various ways until it both generates a high value, and generates their other responses in other circumstances. Once you’ve got a mental model of someone that generates attenuated emotional responses in you that match the ones they report, you will know what it’s like to value what they say they value (to the extent it’s possible to know how another person is feeling).
I’m going to try and explain what I perceive to be how and why many people value those who accept their flaws. This explanation hinges on a few key facts I’ve observed about a large subset of the population.
Fact 1: Lots of people focus their lives around social acceptance and avoiding social rejection, in a way that seems similar to me to how you focus a lot on becoming stronger. I think this comes from our history as social animals who depended on each other for survival, where social rejection often meant death.
I think your mental model of these people might come closer to being correct if whatever nonzero priority you place on gaining social acceptance and avoiding social rejection, and the priority you place on becoming stronger, switched places in the priority-ordering of the person you’re modelling. But, generally, avoiding social rejection is much higher priority than gaining social acceptance, so factor that in too.
Fact 2: Lots of people believe that if they were fully seen, fully vulnerable, fully open about all aspects of themselves, there is a good chance that something about themselves would lead to widespread rejection.
I don’t mean they believe it as in put a high probability on it, though, most people don’t consciously think in Bayesian terms. Rather, this is a fear they have, which often but not always prevents them from doing investigation into the fear and finding out whether it’s true. Like having a phobia that prevents you from interacting with the object of the phobia, and so you never learn on a deep visceral level that the object of your phobia isn’t really dangerous. This is the sort of thing that’s going on when someone with social anxiety stays at home, and very many people have a low (sometimes not so low) level of something analogous to social anxiety.
Inhabit the mental state of someone who thinks like that, and it becomes obvious why having your deepest insecurities known and accepted is highly, highly valuable. It’s like, you live your life in silent fear, and with at least one person, you don’t have to live that way. This isn’t a “well, here’s a weakness I have, and I don’t like having weaknesses, but it’s not a priority to work on it right now, so I guess I’ll live with it while focusing on growing stronger in other ways” situation. This is a “this is an inherent thing about me that I can’t change or fix, which I either think makes me worthy of rejection by others, or I personally think is OK but I believe others will reject me if they learn of it, and I deeply care about not being rejected” situation. Many people have such deep shame about some aspects of themselves, that they can’t even think about things that would lead to thinking about the things that they’re ashamed of, whole chains of thought are off-limits, and you have to infer their insecurities from what they’re reactive to. We’re talking about the sort of thing that someone will open up about to a close friend and then say “I’ve never told that to anyone”, or “I’ve never articulated that before, I didn’t know that’s how I felt until I said it” not “this is priority 57 out of 1,040 to fix, it’s important but I’m unlikely to get to it”.
Perhaps an example will help. One thing people used to be both ashamed of and socially shamed and rejected for, was homosexuality. So, put yourself in the mind-state of someone who knows they have a same-sex attraction in the 1950’s. I think the reaction to gay men was stronger than for lesbians, so put yourself in the shoes of a gay man, who knows he’s attracted to men, this isn’t something he can change (although he may try, and fail, and feel ashamed of his failure), and all the social messages around him say it’s something to be ashamed of. From our viewpoint today in the Western world, we would just give him the message that this isn’t something to be ashamed of (this is what pride parades are about) but few people would have told him that in his time. To him, “growing stronger” would be to become heterosexual. And to find someone who liked him as he was, shared with him the thing he was ashamed of, or accepted him despite it, someone with whom he could be open about this aspect of himself without rejection, would be very valuable.
Also, a note on that original value proposition post, and a theme I see when analyzing it: It feels like asking what the value proposition is, the thing… is an incorrect question, in the same way “what do women want?” is a question without an answer – while there are general themes of things many women like, and it might be nice for young heterosexual men if they could just figure out what all women everywhere want and then do that, women are not a homogenous mass, they are different from each other, want different things, and sometimes the same woman will even (shockingly) want different things at different times. I think it’s similar with people and relationships – there is no one generalized value proposition, and the people who believe there is and they’ve figured out what everyone wants, are typical-minding. They’ve gained an insight or seen a pattern, and then over-generalized it to everyone. If you want a real answer to what the value proposition of relationships is, you should expect there to be several, perhaps many, grouped and clustered according to the psychological traits of the participants and the situations they’re in.
But, you don’t actually need to figure out all the clusters of relationship value propositions.
Your original motivation in the Value Proposition post was:
To prevent this from being a recurring issue, you don’t have to figure out what everyone else values in their relationships, or what’s “supposed to be” the big value prop. What you need in order to prevent that from recurring is to be aware of how valuable a relationship is to you, and why, and how valuable the relationship is to the other person, and why, so that it doesn’t turn long-term net-negative for either of you. What you should be looking for isn’t a relationship that has the things that most people value, but a relationship that has what you value. If someone offers what you value and values what you offer, that’s a match, otherwise not, regardless of what anyone else is doing with their lives, or what anyone says most people value, even if what they say about most people is correct.
Maybe you don’t feel the same feelings as most people in some respect, and that’s fine. Be aware of what you are feeling, and let it be part of what guides you, and you can still find relationships that are fulfilling to you.
I will note, re: “having someone’s back” in a relationship, I feel like “I would really value it if someone else was working on AI alignment” is missing the point. You want to become stronger, but the thing is, ageing is a thing, and accidents happen. Regardless of how you may try, barring some progress on ageing, you will eventually become weaker, and the fact that ageing happens and will continue to happen is most people’s default assumption. Many people value the idea that someone likes them despite knowing their weaknesses and flaws not just to avoid social rejection, but because they feel they can trust that the relationship will continue both “in sickness and in health”. So while I would advise being aware of and monitoring when a relationship has turned net-negative to you, it’s worth noting that “I commit to you even if your flaws make this a net-negative relationship for me” is valuable to lots of people, who realize that their life will have a peak in terms of their abilities and measurable relationship value, and a period of decline before they die. They want someone who will not abandon them even when that would be the logical thing to do for a utility-maximizer. While for some people this is based on feelings, it doesn’t have to be, it can be a “I made a commitment and I keep my commitments” sort of thing too, where being willing to stay committed when things are bad allows you to access higher levels of goodness when things are good.
Pffft: