Meh. Whenever my warranty is about to expire I just ride the resale value and upgrade knowing I’ll sell the old one for a hundred bucks less than I paid for it and get a new warranty for the new phone. I get a new phone every two years for basically $200 and someone else buys my used one probably doing the same thing and selling their old one for $100 less than that.
Over a decade I’ve spent one new phone’s worth of dollars for 5 phones.
No, it is not normal to state what percent-better-person you would leave your romantic partner for. It’s cynical and narcissistic.
What if your partner is in an accident that changes how they look or live? Now that they’re X% “less” than what you signed on for, you can just dip?
Like I get being upfront about stuff, but this is just transactional. It’s not about your commitment to another person, it’s about maximizing your return on investment.
You could have answered my question a bit earlier, I broke my nose this morning and now her divorce lawyer has informed me that my neighbor across the street has gone up to 12% better than me.
EDIT: I just went over and broke the guy’s kneecaps and am now happily married again.
Yeah I’ve had this conversation but percentages are too hard. I said if it comes down to where they need to tabulate and weigh pros vs cons then I already lost. I don’t want to be in those kinds of games.
I understand why someone would say this, it’s just acknowledging your own shortcomings in a way and realizing that you can’t be everything that someone might want. But so what? If someone is willing to do this math with you, then they’re not really appreciative of you as a person. Imperfect is fine, insecure is not.
Being poly makes this a non-issue. In the case that one of my partners meets someone else they want to date at least as much as me, they do. This seems to lead to greater overall happiness.
I know for a fact that Eliezer is open to dating poly people, although I don't know if he is himself poly or just poly compatible.
If they meet someone they want to date more than you, why would they keep you around? You’re 75% less ideal. What are you bringing to the table, besides a lower average score for the polycule?
Ah, the last section. Not incredibly relevant to my post?
On the whole I don't really model an average of the polycule as a general thing. If dating someone I'm not currently would make me happier I talk to my partners about the possibility of a relationship. Thus far this has never gone in an either / or direction; it doing so would be a significant reduction in expected happiness.
Unrelatedly, that paragraph drove my autocorrect / suggester absolutely stupid. It kept trying to shove "def" into the last sentence, and suggesting other nonsense.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to poke at your anxieties! I was remarking on the arbitrary nature of the original post.
While you’re probably right that Eliezer is open to dating poly people, the post in question definitely appears to take a monogamous stance—that is, the question of whether to exchange one person for another of “higher value.”
Saying that you’re cool if
one my partners meets someone else they want to date at least as much as me, they do
is different from
I’d trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you
My partners bring a lot to our relationships. I find it a lot harder to understand what they see in me.
My sense is that he is talking about the modal relationship in our society, that is mono, and in which my understanding is that people often (I would say at least 10% of the time?) do in fact have the "trading up" nature. That being the case, I think it's better for the participants in a relationship to be aware of that, and at what threshold to expect it? Having a moderately awkward discussion early on seems better than the heartbreak later.
This is coming from a very ask / tell culture perspective. I'm autistic enough (diagnosed, not slang / common use) that guess culture / relationships as imperfect information games is a distinctly negative experience. I don't find any "magic" in not considering bad outcomes or pretending that potential futures don't exist (the "happily ever after" expectation) or in leaving things unsaid.
I wouldn’t call 10% of the time “often,” but let’s entertain the idea that it’s a popular concept regardless. We’ll say 100% of people are like this. And they’re constantly trying to trade up. What does that look like? Would most relationships be based on mutual trust and compassion, or would they be cynical cycles of mercenary evaluation?
Meanwhile, though you seem very rational, even the most rational person isn’t free from their subjective experience or perception. It begs the question: how much do you trust your partners’ assessment of you, or themselves, to stay the same for years to come? I can promise it will not. In this paradigm of value-over-commitment, all relationships (even poly ones) are doomed to fail.
When you make a proper commitment to someone (or multiple someones), you’re not shirking the negative possibilities by leaving your “trade-up threshold” unsaid. You’re saying, “I accept the good with the bad.”
And no, I’m not saying people should stick with an abusive partner or someone they don’t like or love. I’m saying that the “trade-up” model is an oversimplified view that places the onus of being “good enough” on another person while shedding the fundamental responsibilities of growing both as individuals and together.
Sure, “happily ever after” is a fantasy, but working toward a lifelong partnership isn’t—unless, of course, you’ve got one foot out the door from day one.
If things change, either internally or interpersonally, and people do change, then I'd rather be able to have an open discussion in those cases as well. I'm into my seventh year with my primary, and I don't foresee things breaking down in a hurry. Still, if being with me was bringing him more suffering than satisfaction, I'd want to know that. It may be that things can be improved within the relationship, although they likely won't without communication. It may also be that things can be improved within the relationship, in which case I'd prefer to know that. I want my partners to be happy, and while there would be an emotional hit to learn that they would be happier without me, I value them being happy more than I value trying to maintain a relationship that is a drag. Like fish, once the relationship is dead I think it's better to get rid of it before it starts to stink. I don't think that a relationship that doesn't make the people in it happy is worth maintaining for the sake of maintaining it.
All I’m saying is, much like using a litany of addons for World of Warcraft, that it’s possible to optimize yourself out of happiness. I don’t trust myself (or anyone else) enough to say what “percent” better someone would need to be to ditch a long-standing partnership, and anyone who does is probably a narcissist.
I still kind of miss DBM, since I raid on FFXIV these days.
I would expect a narcissist to be completely incapable of making such an evaluation to any degree of accuracy; the kind of self honesty it would require seems foreign to my understanding of the narcissistic mind. Is it possible you were thinking of sociopathy here?
Yeah, I feel that. I tried to find a happy middle ground with my add-ons, but the reality is that the game evolved with the expectation that (at mid-to-high levels of play) you use them. That sucks the fun out of it for me when I know the game itself is pushing me to plug in extra crunchy stuff. Sometimes I just wanna be a cool panda monk. And just hanging in Goldshire isn’t really the experience I want, either.
In regards to ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder), one of its hallmarks is challenges in starting or maintaining relationships. Doesn’t mean they don’t have them, just that they’re really really bad at beginning and keeping them. Meanwhile, those with ASPD are unlikely to consider the viewpoint of another person due to their impaired empathy and struggle to acknowledge others’ inner lives. I don’t think a sufferer would even consider having a conversation about this with another person.
Narcissistic personality disorder, on the other hand, often includes the pursuit of higher status by getting close to those with desirable attributes or characteristics. Unlike those with ASPD, people with NPD don’t display an impaired ability to empathize or consider others’ mental states (though they do struggle with relating to anyone else’s experiences).
A narcissist would have zero qualms in telling someone the conditions under which they would abandon them; it would reinforce their (perceived) superior value and demonstrate their power over the other person. Of course, I doubt they would love hearing their partner’s evaluation of them, and this would probably be a mostly one-sided conversation (as I imagine it often is in real life, should it happen).
But yeah, I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a climber who thinks so highly of yourself that you can put hard and fast digits on your loved ones, you’re at least a pre-narcissist.
Yudkowsky is well-known for his work in AI. He occasionally makes jokes, but it’s usually about AI (not relationships). I know that on his profile, it says something like “when I don’t use punctuation, it’s a joke,” akin to Reddit’s /s.
And yeah, he left off a period on the first post, though not the other two. But that said, he rarely makes multi-part jokes. It’s pretty clear to me, having read his posts and articles for a while, that he means this.
To further clarify that this is a “rationalist” of the highest order, consider that he wrote a half-a-million-plus word fanfic of Harry Potter, but with Harry studying science instead of magic: en.wikipedia.org/…/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_o…
No shame in that! It is actually pretty well-written, and it has some engaging points. I’m not “anti-rationalism” or anti-this-guy or anything like that. LessWrong did more for global altruism than I ever will.
I’m just pointing out that a person who has dedicated their entire public persona to an ideology (or lack of one) is probably not joking when they start evaluating romantic partners with supposedly objective percentages.
No kidding. Anyone who thinks the hallmark of a good relationship is being able to determine the point at which they would dump their SO for someone “better” and somehow distill that down to a concrete (yet still highly subjective) number should just avoid relationships altogether. At least until they’ve consulted a proctologist about removing their head from their own ass.
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