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).
I’ve stopped worrying about whether my experience is typical or atypical, and focus on whether I like it or not...
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.)
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.