Myron Hedderson

Karma: 161

Myron Hedderson 7 Oct 2025 11:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Raymond Douglas’s comment on: Gradual Disempowerment Monthly Roundup
Interested in a regular version: yes.
Substack: iffy. I find it’s optimizing for engagement enough that I’ll go through cycles of spending more time there than I intend, then taking a break, and every time I go into the app rather than just reading emails of the people I have subscribed to, I regret it because of wasted time. They have also started making it really easy to subscribe but substantially harder to unsubscribe. This was not true a year ago, IIRC.

Myron Hedderson 18 Sep 2025 11:14 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: chasmani’s comment on: The Eldritch in the 21st century
Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it’s super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn’t have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.
It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.
A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn’t solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I’m tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.
A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people’s lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren’t captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like “people are rational”. In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.

Myron Hedderson 12 Sep 2025 14:07 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gabriel Alfour’s comment on: The Eldritch in the 21st century
Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.

Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.

Myron Hedderson 12 Sep 2025 13:24 UTC
5 points
−4
on: The Eldritch in the 21st century
EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated “Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” as “Most people can’t understand complex topics”, whereas you could have intended “Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics” while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I’m leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it ~~might have been~~ (confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.

This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.

You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don’t expect to understand things. The repeated use of “most people” without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to “most people are dumb”, but let’s let that pass, and assume you’re right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don’t feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
No. Strongly disagree. “Most people don’t understand X” is a thing I could accept, and “most people feel like they can’t understand X, for many Xes” seems like it could be true, but “most people can’t understand X” is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of “it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to” not “this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it”.

I think there may be an important difference between how you’re modeling getting to the point of “I understand this topic”, and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:
Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.
You seem to be thinking of “I understand this topic” as equivalent to “I have reached the state of the art in this topic”, and presenting an implicit dichotomy between “I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic” and “I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me”. Whereas I think there’s a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to “I understand basically how this works, it doesn’t seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______”. And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.

As an example, let’s take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it’s plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event… and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They’re not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it’s no longer mysterious.
Or let’s take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it’s not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn’t require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you’ve got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek—The Original Economics Rap Battle!

Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who’s got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron’s Musings : The Economy. It’s not the best, but it’s an OK starting point where I can say to a friend “go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you’ll get the economy better than you do now”.

Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it’s harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person’s circle of control. But “and so I give up and rot” is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city’s website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they’re typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you’ll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven’t done anything that’s actually intellectually challenging.
We can change this.
This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.
We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.
Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.
If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.
I don’t actually think the change that’s required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it’s a change in attitude, from “the world is confusing, and I can’t understand it or do anything about it”, to “the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes”. And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.

Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the “most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it’s correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don’t, and I guess they’re doomed.

Myron Hedderson 3 Sep 2025 14:16 UTC
13 points
0
on: When Both People Are Interested, How Often Is Flirtatious Escalation Mutual?
What I really want to know is:
- Conditional on mutual interest, what are the relative frequencies of these two kinds of flirtatious escalation?
- Are there particular settings/cultures/etc in which those frequencies are very different?
Preamble: The below assumes interactions between a heterosexual man and woman, can’t comment usefully on other scenarios.
I have no idea about the answer to the first question, but would bet serious money that the answer to the second question is yes.

The reason why, in previous conversations, I had said I personally wouldn’t escalate much without some positive response from the person I’m attempting to flirt with, is because of my personal ethics and expectations around social conventions, which I assume are culturally influenced. I am strongly averse to being pushy about sexual interest, and expect the most likely response if my interest is not reciprocated to be the equivalent of silence—not giving some definitive indication to me the equivalent of “I’m not interested in you, please stop” because that risks a very negative reaction (from a generic male, not from me specifically, but the person I’m flirting with in this hypothetical has no way of knowing what I’m like, and would understandably prioritize safety over clear communication). My way of analyzing a response is, if I get no response, that means stop, if I get a negative response that also means stop, only if I get a positive response of some kind is it OK to continue.

Obviously, this is not the only way the ambiguous signal of “no response” could be interpreted. In a culture where it is strongly expected that women do not express sexual interest of any kind because that is shameful, the dynamic would necessarily be different, because a non-response is the expected response even when the woman being flirted with would like to indicate interest. Similarly, if the social expectation was that if someone would prefer I stop flirting they will say so, I would feel more comfortable interpreting a non-response as “it is OK to continue”. I imagine there might be a culture where that expectation exists, although I don’t know of a specific example.
Also relevant: I expect (due to gender stereotypes confirmed by conversations with women around me, and comparing their responses to my own under the assumption that I’m not too different from most men) women to be more attuned to social subtleties and subtexts than men. Basically, their sensitivity to potential alternate interpretations of the meaning of words or actions that are not surface-level obvious is higher. As a result, I expect them to be able to pick up my indication of interest fairly easily, as long as I’m being not-particularly-subtle by my own estimation. What I’m doing will be plausibly deniable, but still likely clear. I also expect women to do things they think of as not particularly subtle and easy to pick up on (which another woman might notice) that are completely missed by the person they are attempting to flirt with. There are many instances where a woman interprets a behaviour as “this person likes/supports/does not like/does not support me” and my response is “that is just one possible interpretation, what you’re reading something into might have been unintentional or not related to you. You could be right, but I would put a lower probability on it than you seem to be”. This is particularly true in terms of sensitivity to subtle indications of dislike/opposition, but true more generally.

Speculating about cultural change over time, I expect that our (US/Canada) past culture, which put more pressure on women not to “be too forward”, and gave much more latitude to men to pursue women both subtly and directly, would have been more permissive of a man fumbling his way through flirting, getting no response, and continuing regardless, than our current culture is.

Re: your third prior, “People who are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it are usually very hesitant to send escalatory signals (if they even know how to, which they might not)”

I think this falls into a binary distribution. The experience of women I know is that when in their early 20′s, they would get a large number of very clumsy attempts to indicate sexual interest. At the same time, most men tried flirting only rarely. From the typical young woman’s perspective, the experience seemed to be “I get hit on constantly by distasteful men”, while from the typical man’s perspective it was “I rarely try anything with anyone, I don’t want to come across as one of the men that causes problems for women by being an ass”. I reconciled this by modeling the situation as “among those who are low-skill at flirting, which is most people, there are a majority of people who flirt rarely and selectively, investing a lot of effort and emotional weight into each attempt, and a minority of people who take a shot at everyone who crosses their path, basically taking the same approach as a spammer where a 0.1% success rate still yields a sufficient number of successes to be worthwhile”. The experience of the recipients of the “flirting” (although arguably that isn’t what’s happening, it doesn’t have the subtlety or skill you’re thinking of) is that ~all the attempts are terrible by men who aren’t interested in them as an individual at all, and this influences their impression of men in general. In any case: There are at least three possible responses to “I know I’m bad at flirting”—one is to spam the world with low-effort attempts to get a positive response, another is to be very hesitant to attempt to flirt, a third is to attempt to skill up. I’ve seen all 3.

Myron Hedderson 12 Aug 2025 17:26 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
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.

Myron Hedderson 12 Aug 2025 12:29 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
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.

Myron Hedderson 11 Aug 2025 20:24 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
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.

Myron Hedderson 11 Aug 2025 20:07 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
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.

Myron Hedderson 11 Aug 2025 18:16 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
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

Myron Hedderson 11 Aug 2025 12:37 UTC
3 points
0
on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
And I do have various signs that I’m still missing something big in a general cluster to which this topic belongs, so it seems worth digging into.
I don’t think you’re missing anything – you’ve got all the pieces, at least, within the posts you’ve written and the comments you’ve read on them, it’s just putting the pieces together into an answer that feels complete to you.
Which brings us to today’s topic: when I look at the model from The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships, and consider how I’d feel in a relationship which had all the aspects which that post talks about… I mean, it would be good, don’t get me wrong, but it still doesn’t feel that valuable.”
Your sense of what the right answer here is shouldn’t be contingent upon “would I find this value proposition as valuable as they do?” being answered in the affirmative. You are not “most people”, and shouldn’t expect to respond the same way the model you have of “most people” would. The question is not “how would I feel?” but “how do they feel?”. This links back to doing the “I am inhabiting the perspective I imagine them to have” version of empathy rather than the “I am putting myself in their situation” version.
Inhabit their frame of mind fully as best you can, and see if your mental model of them generates an emotional response high in value. Then adjust your mental model of them in various ways until it both generates a high value, and generates their other responses in other circumstances. Once you’ve got a mental model of someone that generates attenuated emotional responses in you that match the ones they report, you will know what it’s like to value what they say they value (to the extent it’s possible to know how another person is feeling).
What’s your deepest insecurity or shame around dating? An unfulfilled aspiration, a personal flaw you could never fix, an obsession too cringe to share? What would it feel like if someone not only accepted it, but was specifically drawn to it?
This fits the “value downstream of willingness to be vulnerable” model very directly, and the way it asks makes it clear that Jacob expects people to find this hypothetical very high-value. So how do we feel about it?
Voice 1: Yeah, my immediate reaction to that one is “yuck”. Someone who’s specifically drawn to something which I myself am ashamed of? That would be a reason to not date that person; unambiguous negative value add.
I’m going to try and explain what I perceive to be how and why many people value those who accept their flaws. This explanation hinges on a few key facts I’ve observed about a large subset of the population.
Fact 1: Lots of people focus their lives around social acceptance and avoiding social rejection, in a way that seems similar to me to how you focus a lot on becoming stronger. I think this comes from our history as social animals who depended on each other for survival, where social rejection often meant death.
I think your mental model of these people might come closer to being correct if whatever nonzero priority you place on gaining social acceptance and avoiding social rejection, and the priority you place on becoming stronger, switched places in the priority-ordering of the person you’re modelling. But, generally, avoiding social rejection is much higher priority than gaining social acceptance, so factor that in too.
Fact 2: Lots of people believe that if they were fully seen, fully vulnerable, fully open about all aspects of themselves, there is a good chance that something about themselves would lead to widespread rejection.
I don’t mean they believe it as in put a high probability on it, though, most people don’t consciously think in Bayesian terms. Rather, this is a fear they have, which often but not always prevents them from doing investigation into the fear and finding out whether it’s true. Like having a phobia that prevents you from interacting with the object of the phobia, and so you never learn on a deep visceral level that the object of your phobia isn’t really dangerous. This is the sort of thing that’s going on when someone with social anxiety stays at home, and very many people have a low (sometimes not so low) level of something analogous to social anxiety.
Inhabit the mental state of someone who thinks like that, and it becomes obvious why having your deepest insecurities known and accepted is highly, highly valuable. It’s like, you live your life in silent fear, and with at least one person, you don’t have to live that way. This isn’t a “well, here’s a weakness I have, and I don’t like having weaknesses, but it’s not a priority to work on it right now, so I guess I’ll live with it while focusing on growing stronger in other ways” situation. This is a “this is an inherent thing about me that I can’t change or fix, which I either think makes me worthy of rejection by others, or I personally think is OK but I believe others will reject me if they learn of it, and I deeply care about not being rejected” situation. Many people have such deep shame about some aspects of themselves, that they can’t even think about things that would lead to thinking about the things that they’re ashamed of, whole chains of thought are off-limits, and you have to infer their insecurities from what they’re reactive to. We’re talking about the sort of thing that someone will open up about to a close friend and then say “I’ve never told that to anyone”, or “I’ve never articulated that before, I didn’t know that’s how I felt until I said it” not “this is priority 57 out of 1,040 to fix, it’s important but I’m unlikely to get to it”.
Perhaps an example will help. One thing people used to be both ashamed of and socially shamed and rejected for, was homosexuality. So, put yourself in the mind-state of someone who knows they have a same-sex attraction in the 1950’s. I think the reaction to gay men was stronger than for lesbians, so put yourself in the shoes of a gay man, who knows he’s attracted to men, this isn’t something he can change (although he may try, and fail, and feel ashamed of his failure), and all the social messages around him say it’s something to be ashamed of. From our viewpoint today in the Western world, we would just give him the message that this isn’t something to be ashamed of (this is what pride parades are about) but few people would have told him that in his time. To him, “growing stronger” would be to become heterosexual. And to find someone who liked him as he was, shared with him the thing he was ashamed of, or accepted him despite it, someone with whom he could be open about this aspect of himself without rejection, would be very valuable.
Also, a note on that original value proposition post, and a theme I see when analyzing it: It feels like asking what the value proposition is, the thing… is an incorrect question, in the same way “what do women want?” is a question without an answer – while there are general themes of things many women like, and it might be nice for young heterosexual men if they could just figure out what all women everywhere want and then do that, women are not a homogenous mass, they are different from each other, want different things, and sometimes the same woman will even (shockingly) want different things at different times. I think it’s similar with people and relationships – there is no one generalized value proposition, and the people who believe there is and they’ve figured out what everyone wants, are typical-minding. They’ve gained an insight or seen a pattern, and then over-generalized it to everyone. If you want a real answer to what the value proposition of relationships is, you should expect there to be several, perhaps many, grouped and clustered according to the psychological traits of the participants and the situations they’re in.

But, you don’t actually need to figure out all the clusters of relationship value propositions.
Your original motivation in the Value Proposition post was:
I had a 10-year relationship. It had its ups and downs, but it was overall negative for me. And I now think a big part of the problem with that relationship was that it did not have the part which contributes most of the value in most relationships. But I did not know that at the time. Recently, I tried asking people where most of the value in their relationships came from, got an answer, and thought “Wait, that’s supposed to be the big value prop? Not just a marginal value prop along with many others? Well shit, I was indeed largely missing that part!”.
To prevent this from being a recurring issue, you don’t have to figure out what everyone else values in their relationships, or what’s “supposed to be” the big value prop. What you need in order to prevent that from recurring is to be aware of how valuable a relationship is to you, and why, and how valuable the relationship is to the other person, and why, so that it doesn’t turn long-term net-negative for either of you. What you should be looking for isn’t a relationship that has the things that most people value, but a relationship that has what you value. If someone offers what you value and values what you offer, that’s a match, otherwise not, regardless of what anyone else is doing with their lives, or what anyone says most people value, even if what they say about most people is correct.
Maybe you don’t feel the same feelings as most people in some respect, and that’s fine. Be aware of what you are feeling, and let it be part of what guides you, and you can still find relationships that are fulfilling to you.
I will note, re: “having someone’s back” in a relationship, I feel like “I would really value it if someone else was working on AI alignment” is missing the point. You want to become stronger, but the thing is, ageing is a thing, and accidents happen. Regardless of how you may try, barring some progress on ageing, you will eventually become weaker, and the fact that ageing happens and will continue to happen is most people’s default assumption. Many people value the idea that someone likes them despite knowing their weaknesses and flaws not just to avoid social rejection, but because they feel they can trust that the relationship will continue both “in sickness and in health”. So while I would advise being aware of and monitoring when a relationship has turned net-negative to you, it’s worth noting that “I commit to you even if your flaws make this a net-negative relationship for me” is valuable to lots of people, who realize that their life will have a peak in terms of their abilities and measurable relationship value, and a period of decline before they die. They want someone who will not abandon them even when that would be the logical thing to do for a utility-maximizer. While for some people this is based on feelings, it doesn’t have to be, it can be a “I made a commitment and I keep my commitments” sort of thing too, where being willing to stay committed when things are bad allows you to access higher levels of goodness when things are good.

Myron Hedderson 1 Aug 2025 17:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Follow-up to “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”
You could be right, and thanks for the feedback. It’s a low-probability speculation, and that quote is evidence against.
There’s a difference between disappointment and disgust, and “can only have fun with people when he treats them as non-agents” is very different from how I think about people, and it is in my nature to try and figure out people who think very differently from me. So far I haven’t got a mental model that fits John’s outputs well in their entirety. My mind is still working on it in the background.

Myron Hedderson 1 Aug 2025 16:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Follow-up to “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”
Sorry about the long posts, but I’m thinking and trying to model how things look from your perspective. EDIT TO ADD: Epistemic status: Speculation.

Hypothesis: You’re like, 30-40 points higher IQ than me, which would put you around 60 points above average (ballpark figures in each case).

If true, that would explain some things. There’s a certain intelligence level that I round down to “basically not intelligent”, and a certain intelligence level that I round up to “too smart for me to really understand things they find intellectually engaging unless they try really hard to dumb things down, or I spend hours where they spent minutes, so I can’t really have a conversation with them about it”—and in either case, it’s hard for me to see distinctions among people too far from my own intelligence-level in either direction. And the same is true for everyone, from what I’ve read. The barrier to mutual understanding seems to kick in around 30-40 IQ points. I understand that for people at a certain low IQ level, “this person went to community college” = “this person is really smart”, with the same reaction to “this person has a doctorate in physics” or “this person is the President”. And I can talk to and connect with people who are around average, as well as people who are pretty smart, while I find it hard to really put myself in the shoes of someone who’s significantly below average in intelligence, and there are people I tag with “too smart for me to really understand”, although relatively few, and I can still understand the parts of them that, ahem, aren’t particularly intelligent :D.
I picture what the world would look like if I was smarter, and thus concepts that took some prodding or prompting for me to get them (but I did get them) just seem obvious from age 5, the way utilitarianism did for me before I knew other people had thought of it and it had a name. Apparently this is something most people are only introduced to in university? Anyway, picturing what the world would look like if I moved up the intelligence scale, the thoughts that output sound like your posts. Most people are basically cats, if you expect to be treated like an adult you have to be trying to have a counterfactual impact. And my model of you as someone well outside the normal intelligence range predicts that my earlier post saying “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people get without being taught” would get a response like “yes, exactly, most people are basically cats, and I’ve just downgraded my estimate of your intelligence”. The first part of which is a similar error to “a community college graduate and a top-level physicist are basically the same”.

The more carefully-worded version of “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people get without being taught”, would be something like “counterfactual thinking isn’t something most people do without being taught, except in rare and fairly stereotypical circumstances, like ‘I was just almost in a car accident’ or ‘what would my life be like today if I had stayed with my first love?’”. I mean, yes, they do basic counterfactuals like “if I eat the cake I will get fat, if I don’t eat the cake I won’t get fat” (which, I note, cats do not), but thinking about the higher-order effects like “if I buy the cake that has this effect on the overall economy, and the world as a whole looks different 6 months from now in these subtle ways” is a thought-pattern most people have to be taught—but can be taught.

If your situation is that you can’t differentiate between average-intelligence people, below-average-intelligence people, and cats, because they all just don’t get things that seem obvious to you, and once they don’t get one obvious thing you worry about what other obvious things they will or won’t get and they just become unpredictable beings you don’t understand very well… then probably my encouragement to treat more people less like cats isn’t going to work for you.

Myron Hedderson 1 Aug 2025 13:05 UTC
2 points
0
on: Follow-up to “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”
I think it’s important to bring the distinction I initially missed, about what you mean by moral agency, into this conversation. From your comment in the other post:
I think this misses the distinction I’d consider relevant for moral agency.
I can put a marble on a ramp and it will roll down. But I have to set up the ramp and place the marble; it makes no sense for me to e.g. sign a contract with a marble and expect it to make itself roll down a ramp. The marble has no agency.
Likewise, I can stick a nonagentic human in a social environment where the default thing everyone does is take certain courses and graduate in four years, and the human will probably do that. I can condition a child with rewards and punishments to behave a certain way, and the child will probably do so. Like the marble, both of these are cases where the environment is set up in such a way that the desired outcome is the default outcome, without the candidate “agent” having to do any particular search or optimization to make the outcome happen.
What takes agency—moral agency—is making non-default things happen. (At least, that’s my current best articulation.) Mathematically, I’d frame this in terms of couterfactuals: credit assignment mostly makes sense in the context of comparison to counterfactual outcomes. Moral agency (insofar as it makes sense at all in a physically-reductive universe) is all about thinking of a thing as being capable of counterfactual impact.
This seems defensible, but nonstandard. Under a definition of “moral agency” that relies on counterfactual credit assignment, a lot of things that would normally be considered the actions of a moral agent acting goodly, wouldn’t count. (Unless I’m misunderstanding, in which case, please correct that misunderstanding.)
Examples:

1. I have an opportunity to cheat on my spouse, or do something else society clearly codes as wrong. I choose not to.
Standard interpretation: Good choice, have a cookie. You are the sort of person I can collaborate with.
Counterfactual credit analysis: Doesn’t seem very agentic. Most of the credit here goes to the society around you and your parents, who taught you through various forms of reinforcement to decide in that way in that kind of situation. Maybe you get a little credit for actually doing the expected thing when the opportunity arose, but very little. You’re basically a cat. A good cat rather than a bad cat, I guess?

2. I want there to be fewer people dying of things they don’t need to die of. So I read up GiveWell’s stuff, and donate a large amount to each of their top recommended charities.
Standard interpretation: Again, good job, not many people do this at present and it’s obviously helpful on the object level for people to behave in this way.
Counterfactual credit analysis: ~No points awarded. Everyone with lots of money is aware of GiveWell now, their top charities are not funding constrained (at least that’s what I understood to be the case a few years ago, don’t rely on this statement as fact without double-checking), and if you didn’t donate someone else would.

3. As a kid, my brother dies of cancer, so I vow to do what I can to make sure that happens to fewer people. (This didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to a friend). I go study hard for decades and become a doctor specializing in the kind of cancer my brother died of (my friend did not do this, but he went a significant way down that path). Through various medical means, my actions directly prevent many deaths during my career.
Standard interpretation: Mission accomplished? You did what you set out to do, stayed true to the goals of your childhood self, and should look back on your life with happiness and pride.
Counterfactual credit analysis: The 80,000 hours career path analysis which basically said “the counterfactual impact of becoming a doctor is low, try and do something neglected” is where the concept of counterfactual thinking clicked for me. Few points awarded, clearly falls within the “just being a marble doing the expected thing” category of life-choices.
I think disgust at people who aren’t agentic in terms of thinking about and optimizing for their counterfactual impact is the wrong move.
Background information that informs this view: Most people (not most people here, but most people generally) will have a reaction to “you’re not really agentic and may get a disgust reaction from me unless you’re optimizing for counterfactual impact” with either a blank confused stare because they’re not familiar with the relevant concepts, or something like “you mean like speculating about how things would be different if the Nazis won WW2? What does that have to do with whether i should cheat on my wife, or get credit for not doing so?”.

In this situation, most people are like the woman with the nail in her head, except she doesn’t know she has a nail in her head and isn’t going to be defensive about it unless you start telling her she’s a terrible/stupid person or cat who you are better than and you can’t work with her, for having a nail in her head and not doing anything about it. The standard person’s reaction to counterfactual reasoning, once it’s explained why that’s relevant, might be “well that definitely changes some of my life-plans”, which would be like the woman going “hey look, you’re right, there is a nail in there, thanks!” Although consistently updating how you think to incorporate and apply a new concept in all areas where it’s relevant rather than just applying it in its original context is also a skill that needs to be taught to many people, not something that happens automatically.
People who follow standard rules in standard situations are perfectly good collaborators in those situations. Also, reacting with disgust to those people regardless of their behaviour destroys the incentive structure which makes them good collaborators. People who don’t cheat on their spouse and do become oncologists should get a cookie, even though those are standard things to do with a low counterfactual impact. And there is a material difference between someone who is a doctor and someone who is a nonfunctional alcoholic, in terms of how grown-up and reliable they are, and that difference should be recognized, rather than putting them both in the same bucket as a cat.
Another counterpoint: On my understanding of how physics works (which admittedly may be wrong in important ways) we don’t have free will, there are no counterfactual universes, and we are all 0% actually-agentic. Your thoughts at moment t are a result of the various physical forces operating on the molecules of your brain, which strictly depend on the state of the system at t-1, and backward in time to the beginning of time. When pushed to the limit, “how much credit for this outcome goes to an agentic individual, vs. to environmental influences and marbles doing what marbles do?” has a correct answer “0% to the individual”. Any choice of how much agency to grant someone in your mind seems kind of an arbitrary choice, unless you believe the universe is doing something other than unfolding according to physical laws, and our choices can in actual fact change the future. “Agency” is a useful component to a model of the interaction between humans and animals, not the territory of base reality. And picking “only agency that requires familiarity with concepts most people don’t have familiarity with counts” seems like a choice that will have negative systematic effects.

With all that said… I agree with approximately all of this, from Thane, below:
The main impact is on the ability to coordinate with/trust/relax around that person. If they’re well-modeled as an agent, you can, to wit, model them as a game-theoretic agent: as someone who is going to pay attention to the relevant parts of any given situation and continually make choices within it that are consistent with the pursuit of some goal. They may make mistakes, but those would be well-modeled as the foibles of being a bounded agent.
On the other hand, people who can’t be modeled as agents (in a given context) can’t be expected to behave in this way. They may make decisions based on irrelevant parts of the situations, act in inconsistent ways, and can’t be trusted not to go careening in some random direction in response to random stimuli. Sort of like, ahem, an LLM.
Note that I think it isn’t a binary “There Are Two Types of People” thing.
What you in your post mean when you say “grown up” in this sentence:
Sometimes they mean they want to be treated as moral agents (i.e. treated as a grown-up, rather than a child or a cat).
Seems to me similar to what Thane is pointing at with “game-theoretic agent”, and what Harry in HPMOR would call a sane adult.
And, you get to choose who you will treat as an adult. If someone wants you to empathize with them, just do so, it’s an almost-costless action that many people value. But if they want you to treat them as an adult, it’s fine to say “sorry, there’s a nail in your head and you should know it’s there and want to remove it but apparently you don’t, and under this circumstance I find it difficult to take you seriously”. Not in those exact words, as that will quite often be perceived as an attack or extremely rude, but the message “there are requirements/standards if you want me to treat you as an adult, here is what they are, you’re not currently meeting them” is useful information for people who want you to treat them as adults. Basically, the message “in order to be treated as a Very Serious Adult, you have to have your life and your self in a certain degree of order” is standard, even people who want to be treated with more respect than you’re giving them may get it.

Myron Hedderson 31 Jul 2025 19:35 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Ok, I see your point and acknowledge that that is a good and valuable distinction. And, the reality is that most people are just responding to their environment most of the time, and you would class them as non-agents during those times, morally speaking.

But, unlike if people were literally marbles, you can sign a contract with most people and expect them to follow through on most of their commitments, where in practice there’s nothing preventing them from breaching contract in a way that harms you and helps them in the short term. So they don’t have no agency. And in small daily choices which are unconstrained or less-constrained by the environment, where the default option is less clear, people do make choices that have counterfactual impact. Maybe not on civilization-spanning scale (it would be a very chaotic world if reality was such that everyone correctly thought they could change the world in major ways and did so) but on the scale of their families, friend-groups and communities? Sure, quite often. And those choices shape those groups.

So my opinion is that humans in general:
a) Aren’t very smart.
b) Mostly copy those around them, not trying to make major changes to how things are.
c) When they do try to make changes, the efforts tend to be copied from someone else rather than figured out on their own.
d) But are faced with small-scale moral choices on a daily basis, where their actions are not practically constrained, and whether they cooperate or defect will influence the environment for others and their future selves. It is in those contexts where they display moral agency, to the extent that it is present for them.

Very few people are doing things like thinking through the game theory or equilibria effects of their actions, or looking at the big picture of the civilization we live in and going “how is this good/bad, and what changes can we make to get it to a better place?” in a way that’s better than guessing or copying their friends, with the end result of a civilization that thrashes around mostly blindly. If you’re disgusted with anyone who is not actively trying to remake the world in at least some respect, you’re going to be disgusted with almost everyone. But back to moral agency not being binary: the small-scale stuff matters, and standard adult humans are more morally agentic even when using your understanding of “moral agency” than cats are. I would also say, it’s good for people who are unable to accurately predict the long-term consequences of their actions to just copy what seems to have worked in past and respond to incentives, just play the role of a marble unless they’re really sure that their deviation from expected behaviour is good on net. And there are very few who are good enough predictors that they can look at their situations, choose to go uphill instead of down, and pick good hills to die on. Most of them will have grown up in families not composed of such people, and will need to have it pointed out to them that they have and should use more agency.
As an example: It is not at all difficult to talk to your elected representative. They frankly like it (in my experience) when an engaged citizen engages with them. This is a thing anyone can do. When I suggest to someone that this is a thing that might help solve a problem they have (for example, let’s say their interaction with a government agency has gone poorly and there’s clearly a broken process), it is often clear that this is not something they have even considered as being inside their possibility-space. This doesn’t make these people the equivalent of human marbles by their nature. A simple “hey, you can just do things to make the world different, such as this thing for example” is often enough for them to generalize from. Sometimes the idea takes a few examples/repetitions to take root, though.

Now that I’m clearer on what you mean by moral agency, I’m not sure why you would ever expect that to be widespread among the population, and have to suspend the belief that the person you’re interacting with is a moral agent. It’s just straightforwardly true that almost nobody is trying to achieve a really non-default outcome. Any society composed mostly of people trying to change it “for the better” according to their understanding of better, which involves achieving non-default outcomes, rather than just going along with the system they were born into, would have collapsed and gotten invaded by a society that could coordinate better. At our current intelligence levels, anyway. A society composed of very smart people (relative to the current baseline) could probably come to explicit, explained, consciously chosen agreement from each individual on a lot of things and use that as a basis for coordination while leaving people free to explore the possibility-space of available social changes and propose new social agreements based on what they find, but the society we’ve actually got, cannot. So we’ve got to use conformity as a coordination mechanism instead.

Taking this back to empathy for a second: It is usually correct (has better effects) for most people not to swim against the social current. Yes, our society is an evolved system with many problems that would not exist if it were (correctly) intelligently designed instead, but that doesn’t mean most people can just start trying to make changes, without breaking the system and making things much worse. Those who do the default thing, shouldn’t be the subject of disgust, even if they’re one of the rare people who wouldn’t break things by mucking about with them. If understanding that someone just went with the flow provokes disgust in you, I think it’s reasonable for you to ask whether, in that person’s case, they really ought to have done otherwise, and also, whether it’s reasonable for them to have known that, given the society we live in doesn’t teach or encourage the kind of moral agency you respect to its members (for obvious reasons of social stability).

Myron Hedderson 31 Jul 2025 17:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Ok, well, one thing is, there are double and triple negatives in your post, which are tripping me up. If you suspend belief in their moral agency in order to have fun with them, that makes sense. If breaking your suspension of disbelief in their moral agency was an issue that prevented you from having fun with them, I’d be (and I was) confused, and start to wonder if I’d mixed up a negation somewhere.
X: I believe most humans have moral agency. If they don’t meet a fairly high standard of behaviour, I’ll be disappointed.
!X: I disbelieve most humans have moral agency. I can have fun with them even so.
!!X=X: I suspend disbelief that most humans have moral agency. A no-fun zone.
!!!X=!X: My suspension of disbelief was broken by the conversation with the professor. Fun again?

Anyway, “I can have fun with others when I don’t treat them as moral agents” is clear and makes sense from what I imagine your perspective might be, let’s move on.

Agency isn’t a binary property which humans have and cats and environmental features don’t. A more nuanced perspective allows for gradations of moral agency. For example, we don’t expect young children to be full moral agents or reliable as a fellow agent in a group doing something important, but we do expect them, once they have reached a certain age, not to bite their siblings and to use good manners and otherwise follow most foundational social expectations on good days when they’ve had a nap recently. Our expectations for cats are lower, but we still expect to be able to cooperate with them more than we can with mindless tools or features of the environment such as rocks and trees. So: If you genuinely put your college teammates and anyone who doesn’t meet your high standards for yourself in the same bucket as cats, I think you would be treating them as if they have less agency than they in fact do. They may not be on your level, but they aren’t tools or environmental features or cats or children.

It’s entirely appropriate to conclude you can’t rely on someone to work with you on something important if the evidence shows this is true. But you could probably rely on most people to do some helpful things, and often the “this person isn’t reliable” tag is only applicable to a given person in some situations/contexts—it is very rare for a person to be completely useless for everything. The better you understand a given person, the better able to evaluate their reliability in different situations and for different tasks you will be. Often people are reliable about the things they care about, and not about the things they don’t.

As for voting weight, that should likely be a complicated mix of factors depending on the situation. I think it is a good idea to give people voting weight in a decision if the decision impacts them, for example. Even to the extent of allowing them to vote in favour of what seems clearly like something that will harm them, as long as it doesn’t harm me or have other large externalities. If they need to touch a hot stove to learn it’s hot because they’re not willing to listen when I say “the stove is hot”, as long as it’s not going to kill them, OK then, carry on and learn your lesson. (side note, I’m not always right, sometimes someone’s preferences make sense in a way I don’t appreciate at first, which is another reason to give their vote for something I disagree with weight). I also up-weight someone’s vote (to the extent I have the power to make that decision) if they have some related expertise (I could be conscientious and they could be mostly very flaky, and yet they know more about something I know very little about—I can’t know everything about everything, much as I might try).

Myron Hedderson 31 Jul 2025 14:25 UTC
3 points
0
on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
I’ve read all the comments that have been made to this point before making one myself—I was going to make one very much like @Simon Pepin Lehalleur’s. With the resulting conversation-thread as context, I’m still confused by something. When you say having fun with your college group-members involved “suspension of disbelief”, what are you suspending disbelief in, exactly? What is your belief-state when disbelief is suspended, vs. your belief-state when disbelief is not suspended?

Another thing: You mention that imagining what if you were like other people including all relevant psychological and emotional factors puts you in the position of “treating them like cats”, which yes, was a bit misleading in the original post, as you later clarify that you do empathize with cats, in pretty much the way I’d say it may be helpful to empathize with humans. I’d like to disambiguate a few different ways other people can be “like cats”.
1. Cats think very differently than you.
2. Cats are (according to many) of less moral worth than you.
3. Cats are nonhuman.

You also say in your post “my so-called fellow humans”, which is part of what makes “treating people like cats” seem more objectionable than just “treating people as beings who think very differently than I do, generally speaking”. Specifically, “Like cats” coupled with “my so-called fellow humans” gestures indirectly towards treating humans like nonhuman animals, which pattern matches to “what people say before genociding the outgroup”. I’m not suggesting you were thinking or intending anything along those lines, just pointing out why this combination may be distracting from the point you were trying to make, for some.

Does putting yourself in the shoes of a cat involve “suspension of disbelief”? I don’t think it should, you just have accurate understandings of some aspects of cat-psychology, and an awareness that there are many things about cat-psychology and what it’s like to be them that you don’t understand. And similarly with other humans—you may be very different from some of them in some ways, but there shouldn’t be a disbelief you have to suspend in order to interact with them in productive and potentially enjoyable ways? There’s something I’m confused about here.

A key thing, though, is that while 1 may be true of many humans, and arguably from your perspective 2 may as well, what makes someone human is not a certain level of intellectual capacity or drive. So the “so-called” in “my so-called fellow humans” is inaccurate. Even very lazy humans are of the same species as you, and more a fellow to you than a cat is. Maybe what you meant is “my so-called ‘fellow’ humans”, where you feel little fellowship with people very unlike yourself in terms of drive to self-improve, but recognize shared humanity with them, in which case that seems better than the alternative interpretation, and selecting friends who are similar to you in your deeply-held values (such as things that would cause a disgust reaction if someone doesn’t share them) is a thing many people do.

Myron Hedderson 29 Jul 2025 18:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I am not the right person to ask about what works well in clubs, as I wouldn’t say my experiences at clubs were particularly successful or enjoyable, but I very much doubt anyone would kick you out of a club for not drinking or anything like that, so give it a shot and see how it goes? You get to decide what “works” for you, in this situation, and if you had a good time that’s a success.

As for the issue of consent while very intoxicated, yes that is an issue.

Myron Hedderson 28 Jul 2025 17:33 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Sean Herrington’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
The point about making out is very valid, I’ve seen that plenty of times, and that should count as “pairing up sexually”. For whatever reason/no good reason, it didn’t occur to me to mention it in my longer comment.

From the perspective of someone who has never actually enjoyed the clubbing experience before, the above advice sounds like good advice for how to have a better time. :)

Myron Hedderson 28 Jul 2025 15:20 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I can’t make strong claims here, as I go to bars and clubs fairly rarely. But I second the observation that it might be different in urban vs. rural areas, or (I add) different based on type of club. For example, the bar in my dad’s family’s extremely small hometown is the local gathering spot for those who want to have a beer with friends, which is very different from the loud, confusing, crowded dance clubs where you’re packed in like sardines with people you don’t know and can’t even see clearly. I think a valid analysis has to segregate by type of bar/club. The small-town bar I’m thinking of does have live entertainment and dancing (also darts, which wouldn’t work in a darkened environment where many people are quite drunk), but it’s a very different scene.

With respect specifically to the loud, dark, crowded places, lots of people find those off-putting and don’t go, or go rarely. It is fairly common advice to look elsewhere rather than at bars/clubs for dates. But: for someone who is young and anxious and not very sure how to meet people for dates/sex, going out with friends and getting moderately to very intoxicated in a place where you will also meet people you don’t know who are in a similar situation, is a way to overcome that barrier. And the fact you can’t really tell what’s going on 10 feet away, can’t hear what other people are saying very well, and everyone is expecting this to be an environment where people are drinking, means this is a more forgiving environment to do/try things that might be judged inappropriate and/or unacceptable in other environments. If you do something very obvious to indicate your sexual interest in someone in most public places, security may be called, but on the dance floor of a club, standards of acceptable behaviour are more lax, and behaviours themselves are less consistently observable. Also, if you try something with one person and get rebuffed, few to none of the other people will know it happened, so you can try again with someone else shortly thereafter. So my sense is that there are (or, were last time I checked, which admittedly was a few years ago) a lot of young (late teens to early 20′s) people bumbling their drunken way through social interactions in clubs. I’m sure plenty of them do leave the club together and have sex, but it’s hard to know for sure. Another thought: By reputation and it seems by design, clubs are places where bad decisions are made, and so if you want to stress less about your decision-making around sex and just go have some with someone fairly random who you don’t know well (many people will not want to do this, but some do), clubs give you license to do so. Or you think of yourself as not particularly worthy of the attention of those you may be interested in and so you figure you might have a better short if everyone’s drunk and can’t see each other very well, a club is a place where this will be true.

I started this whole train of thought by considering the sentence “Yet in my admittedly-limited experience of actual bars and clubs, I basically never see such matching?”, and thinking that that’s true for me as well, but I do (did, when I went) see people trying to get laid—and by its nature, the environment of a club is not conducive to my monitoring the social interactions of the people around me to see how they’re going, so I wouldn’t expect to know for sure based on what I observe while in a club, who went home with who. You learn that after the fact, if your friends tell you they hooked up.

I also saw a lot of guys sitting on the sidelines and drinking, trying to build up the “liquid courage” to initiate a conversation with someone they might like the look of, and a lot of women dancing in groups, so that they can be visible without being too vulnerable.