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.
Have you considered the possibility that you are a psychopath?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I was sort of surprised you were doing it at all for that reason.
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.