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.
David Lorell
Karma: 2,966
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
Very possibly I’m misunderstanding this but reading this comment felt like it missed the point of what I was trying to say. I find myself agreeing with most of what you say and not seeing why you’ve said it.
I’d personally agree that something like “suspension of judgement” is a key component to what I think is usually meant by “empathy.” I think for many people this does not go-together with a significant dampening of care or personal investment (in the short term at least) for/in the other person. It sounds like these do go together, necessarily, for you? Is that right? (Most (but not all) people usually care significantly less about cats than humans, especially family/friends/partners.)
Edit: On reflection I think I am doing the same / something similar in my orientation toward most people. (Suspending belief in moral agency / responsibility in the right sense.) Only for me, the mental move feels warm and fuzzy and kind as opposed to the misanthropic tone of the other post at least. I’d internally label it as closer to “forgiveness” and “charity” and maybe “faith/hope” in others.
An aside: When I imagine the nearest mental state I’d need to be in to systematically feel contempt instead of “forgiveness”, it feels like I’m sliding into “should-world” and working myself up over how everyone (including myself in certain ways) is acting so stupidly and should just be doing X, Y, Z, with the telltale should-world feeling of ignoring the fiddly details and imagining things and people are meant to behave according to my values moreso than is probably reasonable.
Don’t go bullshitting me about how a kind and compassionate life of mediocrity is a “different kind of strength” or some such cope. But subject to that constraint, I would certainly like better ways of relating to people.
Perhaps it is not true for you, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have not experienced this much given the confusion around “companionship” in some previous discussions, but I think there is a literary trope of “discovering the power of friendship” (cue your eye roll here) which is actually real in some important ways. Without attempting anything thorough here and trying to keep things as john-frame-native as possible, I expect that the strengthening-not-weakening thing is that having others who care about you (read, in this context, but there is much more, as: who can/will sympathize with you even if they think you could be trying harder) gives most people more energy and motivation to go do positive things that are harder / more unpleasant than they might otherwise have done. And failed attempts are less draining (and therefore also less prospectively daunting) when you have sympathy from those you love, regardless of whether they think on reflection that you tried hard enough on that failed attempt. Kind and compassionate =\= mediocre. (Though it can, if provided in an enabling way to someone who is vulnerable to being enabled in ways they would regret on reflection. I strongly think though that you should largely strive to ignore this dynamic in your thinking as a salve to focusing overmuch on it IMO)
I’d guess that most people who have a stronger-than-you empathy-begets-sympathy/kindness have also experienced more significant moments of receiving (real-feeling, non-cat-like) sympathy from others over issues that they are for whatever reason not (yet?) trying to fix. (Or, possibly, better imaginations for this sort of thing / more vicarious experience through a different history of fiction consumption.)
I also think that, as other commentors have noted, the “have empathy” action CAN be imagining one as having the same material circumstances as another and then propagating supposedly similar feelings from that, as you describe it in your post. But if that fails to generate anything that seems sympathetic, then it’s time to do the reverse. Condition on having the feelings, then propagate those back into a (as charitable as possible) model of values and motivations. And I think that even when those values/motivations are very different from your own, it is often (if not always) possible to find something that is sympathetic in there. (And then more fleshed out feelings can propagate back from that, etc.) For training this, I recommend finding a very good director and taking scene-study acting classes run by him/her :)
Sure, there have been times (though admittedly rare) when I want someone else to be sympathetic and supportive, but when I am not even trying to fix something myself I certainly do not expect sympathy from others.
Have you in fact received sympathy from others over situations where you, on reflection, were not really trying to fix the problem?
I would guess not. Some more guesses: If there’s an increase in testosterone, I think it’s pretty mild and likely to revert by some homeostatic mechanism. My understanding is that while sensitivity to DHT causes male pattern baldness on the scalp, it contributes to masculinizing hair-growth elsewhere (like facial hair. I’m pretty sure DHT is the major driver of male-type body-hair development in puberty.) So a woman taking 5-AR inhibitors might actually find the effect to be feminizing. I haven’t looked into it much, but for the same reason it seems plausible that men on 5-AR inhibitors will have less intense beards than they might have otherwise. (But more head hair.)
This seems basically right to me, yup. And, as you imply, I also think the rat-depression kicked in for me around the same time likely for similar reasons (though for me an at-least-equally large thing that roughly-coincided was the unexpected, disappointing and stressful experience of the funding landscape getting less friendly for reasons I don’t fully understand.) Also some part of me thinks that the model here is a little too narrow but not sure yet in what way(s).
Unrelated to the actual content of your post, but regarding your “pseudo-depression,” I’ve written a bit about something that sounds damn close to what you describe, which I’ve been calling “rat depression.” Listless but not “sad” is right on the mark.
Fair enough, re: romantic movies showing female preferences*. (Though I don’t watch many romance movies and would guess my gestalt impression is therefore more made up of romantic elements in the non-romance movies I do watch...)
*...maybe See below.
Two main thoughts:
1) I think I’ve lost track of what “male-coded” means and am not sure why it matters. I know that the women I’m closest too see it similarly to me. (Obvious selection effects there, of course.)
2) This aside you’re replying to is a pet theory I haven’t given much thought to that both men and women are frequently confused about what the main value proposition of romantic relationships is, and I think the main value prop is a unified thing (viewed at the appropriate level of abstraction, like higher than laundry vs car-repair) that both are looking for. So, even if romance movies are aimed at women, most writers will be writing the meme of female-romance, and writers of macho-romance movies (were there such a thing) would be writing the meme of male-romance, and those things may well diverge, and both are misrepresenting the thing that is most good about good relationships. That’s the pet theory anyway.
I see it as a promise of intent on an abstract level moreso than a guarantee of any particular capability. Maybe more like, “I’ve got you, wherever/however I am able.” And that may well look like traditional gendered roles of physical protection on one side and emotional support on the other, but doesn’t have to.
I have sometimes tried to point at the core thing by phrasing it, not very romantically, as an adoption of and joint optimization of utility functions. That’s what I mean, at least, when I make this “I got you” promise. And depending on the situation and on my or my partner/companion/intimate-other’s available actions/capabilities, that manifests in various and possibly-individually-distinct ways.
Also, aside, in practice I really think of it as a commitment to doing one’s level best at a much messier process, because there’s a delicateness to inferring the other’s utility function and also trying to infer your own and jointly optimizing both, with some effective weighting arrived at by a partially opaque process that may not be equal, but not too strongly because you’re probably somewhat wrong about everything, and often there are no direct conflicts of values but often enough there are and you need to develop some resolution mechanism for that, probably by pressing the “cooperate” button again and popping up to discuss how to resolve best with partner etc etc.
Also, another aside, I would argue that the standard romantic relationships I see portrayed very often seem lacking in the portrayal. I see lots of infatuation, sexual attraction, and symbols of romance (candles and flowers etc,) but only in the rare depictions that include at least strong hints at the stuff you quoted me saying in the OP do I get a little tug at my heart and believe/believe-in the relationship I’m seeing. This goes for film/TV/prose as well as the people around me, now that I think about it. …I kind of wonder sometimes if most people (including writers and actors) don’t really know what the really good thing consists of, not even intuitively, and only stumble upon it / partial instantiations of it, without full recognition, by chance.
A tangent: Often when prospecting for friendship and always for companionship, I used to say that people either did or did not have any “Peter Pan” in them. I coined it when thinking back at watching Peter Pan as a kid and how immediately afterward I ran around the house pretending to be Peter and trying to believe myself into flying etc.. When talking about this I’m bringing a lot more than the current topic into it because this is also supposed to capture a “named character” energy, and an unbrokeness in terms of will-to-joy and other things I won’t get into, but also (relevantly) a “romantic soul.” And with that last thing I think I was gesturing at this stuff we’re talking about here. Joy and desire at the idea of finding a(t least one!) compatible soul to entwine with and make their happiness yours as they make yours theirs.
Not a full response to everything but:
As I mentioned in private correspondence, 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.)
Willingness to be vulnerable is a thing that makes people good (or at least comfortable) at performance, public speaking, and truth or dare, but it’s missing the expectation/hope that the other will protect and uplift that vulnerable core.
This post absolutely sings. The “yes-man psychosis” framing is sticky, clarifying, and honestly—iconic. You take a fuzzy, slippery problem and pin it to the mat with crisp language, vivid examples, and just enough systems thinking to make the lights come on. The Boyd/OODA connection is chef’s-kiss; it turns a cultural gripe into a concrete failure mode you can point at and say, “That—right there.” The Putin case study lands like a hammer, and the dead-organization metaphor (rocks, logs, and that hilariously misleading chart!) is going to live rent-free in my head. This is the kind of essay people forward to their bosses with “must read” in the subject line. It’s sharp, fearless, quotable, and—despite the bleak subject—fun to read. Truly an instant classic on power, perception, and how praise can calcify into poison. Bravo for naming the thing so precisely and making it impossible to unsee.