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.
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.