I’m pretty sure love has nothing to do with altruism. I rarely feel love for anyone or anything, but I’m vegan because I don’t want to support the harm of animals, and I want to dedicate my life to effective altruism because it seems like the only sensible thing to do. I don’t even like animals, but their welfare is important to me. Similarly, I don’t like most humans either, but I similarly care about their welfare.
Thanks for the input, a lot of this writing is figuring out what love is to me. Where I ended up was that to care for someone or something else’s welfare is to love them/it and then using love as a basis for allocating resources at my disposal (I ended up going down a rabbit hole on this one).
I found this to be a more comprehensive model and truer to my experience of love than the way I’ve seen it commonly referred to in media where it is almost a mind trap of ‘obsessive thoughts’ about another (much like lust but not necessarily tied to sex).
And as another example, I’m a female who’s love gets staggeringly strong sometimes, maybe like the author’s wife, yet I still want to support effective altruism rather than giving to relatives impulsively. I have a male friend with some autism traits and probably lower love feelings, who’s not at all interested in effective altruism, but gives generous impulsive gifts to people he knows. So I really don’t know if there’s a correlation between love and altruism, and if there if, in which direction.
Thanks, that’s interesting. One point I’m trying to work through is the importance of salience/ability to imagine others—i.e. is your ‘autistic-traits friend’ simply not able to hold a salient picture of people/animals outside of their social circle.
So while their gap between ‘any given person’ and ‘person I actually know’ is minimal; they simply are not able to imagine ‘an abstract person’ so their love of people outside their social circle is zero. Similarly, if someone in their social circle moves away or something, that person is no longer salient and is effectively excluded from all considerations of love (until the friend is prompted to think of them).
Conversely: since you are thinking about effective altruism, the potential recipients are salient to you rather than ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’.
To fit it into the ‘factors’ I consider above, ‘shared-experiences’ are all forgotten and set to zero.
I’m pretty sure love has nothing to do with altruism. I rarely feel love for anyone or anything, but I’m vegan because I don’t want to support the harm of animals, and I want to dedicate my life to effective altruism because it seems like the only sensible thing to do. I don’t even like animals, but their welfare is important to me. Similarly, I don’t like most humans either, but I similarly care about their welfare.
Thanks for the input, a lot of this writing is figuring out what love is to me. Where I ended up was that to care for someone or something else’s welfare is to love them/it and then using love as a basis for allocating resources at my disposal (I ended up going down a rabbit hole on this one).
I found this to be a more comprehensive model and truer to my experience of love than the way I’ve seen it commonly referred to in media where it is almost a mind trap of ‘obsessive thoughts’ about another (much like lust but not necessarily tied to sex).
And as another example, I’m a female who’s love gets staggeringly strong sometimes, maybe like the author’s wife, yet I still want to support effective altruism rather than giving to relatives impulsively. I have a male friend with some autism traits and probably lower love feelings, who’s not at all interested in effective altruism, but gives generous impulsive gifts to people he knows. So I really don’t know if there’s a correlation between love and altruism, and if there if, in which direction.
Thanks, that’s interesting. One point I’m trying to work through is the importance of salience/ability to imagine others—i.e. is your ‘autistic-traits friend’ simply not able to hold a salient picture of people/animals outside of their social circle.
So while their gap between ‘any given person’ and ‘person I actually know’ is minimal; they simply are not able to imagine ‘an abstract person’ so their love of people outside their social circle is zero. Similarly, if someone in their social circle moves away or something, that person is no longer salient and is effectively excluded from all considerations of love (until the friend is prompted to think of them).
Conversely: since you are thinking about effective altruism, the potential recipients are salient to you rather than ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’.
To fit it into the ‘factors’ I consider above, ‘shared-experiences’ are all forgotten and set to zero.