Thread by @EpistemicHope

I want to add some clarification here, because the way I phrased this makes it sound like I'm insisting on ambition in a partner, which is not quite right.

https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1425669251235340296

The main thing is that a causal outsider might think "there must be lots of EA women who are like, and who might want to date, Eli."

And there's a mistake here, which is reading most EAs as doing pretty much the same thing as me.

Which is not how I conceptualize it at all.

There is a foundational thing that I share with EA culture, which is something like a desire to help + basic quantitative reasoning + the idea that we should check that our "helping" actually helps.

But most EAs discover the EA ideology, and will pretty much stick with it indefinitely.

Which means that they are really not doing the thing that I am trying to do.

If you're doing it right, by my lights, EA is a very exciting step, but you keep checking and questioning and trying to improve your understanding.

And if you do that sincerely, you're gonna find all the holes, and weak assumptions, and considerations that are more important.

You run with your best guess of the correct ideology, the correct impact model, and then you notice why it won't work, why your picture was naive.

Your worldview is gonna shift, a lot, many times over.

Look at @ben_r_hoffman. In some sense Ben is an EA. He's trying to use reason and evidence to improve the world on a vast scale.

But he's radically different from most people who identify as EAs. The things he talks about range from "idiosyncratic" to "esoteric" to "crazy-seeming"?

That's because he's doing it right.

Ben is attending the error signals he's getting from the world, and following the threads where they lead.

And they lead through multiple iterative ontological shifts.

Not just updating your "beliefs", but your way of being, as you realize, over and over, how deeply you were mistaken.

You don't just change your credences (though, to be sure, that happens a lot too).

You realize that you didn't even have the right concepts to ask the right questions to be in the ballpark of the correct answer.

And updating your ontology, if you're taking those updates seriously, often changes not only your plans, but your embodied sense of affordances, your way of being, your vibe.

I've passed through a few ontological shifts like that, and I expect to pass through many more before I die. It seems pretty plausible that I'll keep growing until I look as weird and crazy-seeming, to bystanders, as Ben does.

Admittedly, Ben is chosen as particularly weird-seeming-to-outsiders example.

The measure of success is NOT how weird you are, but how correct you are.

But becoming weird is an expected side effect (which is really just another way of making the claim that the mainstream is really far from having a correct grasp on things.)

But if you're not expecting to become very strange as you get older, you're implicitly expecting to stay within the typical distribution of correctness.

You're assuming that you're not going to do much better than the typical person.

This is what I mean when I say that I am much more ambitious than most EAs.

The thing that I am doing is fundamentally not the same thing as the typical EA.

Most EAs are NOT constantly clawing for a better grasp on the world, and unreservedly following that path wherever it leads them.

https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1425873563064553474?s=20

(Though, to be clear, many of the BEST EAs are doing something like what I’m attempting to do, and an even larger fraction of the best rationalists.)

Getting back to romantic partnership (sub-Eli):

Contrary to what I might have implied, there _isn't_ a strong requirement that a person be on this sort of relentless quest to understand and integrate everything important, in order to be a good partner for me, at for the medium term.

(Though to be clear that is an ENORMOUS plus, and probably is a requirement for the kind of partnership I most want, and am taking aim at for the long run).

But it is a no-go to have a partner who is conceptualizing us as doing the same sort of thing, as orienting to the world in more-or-less the same way, when we’re not.

Wait.

Actually, I wrote that sentence in my draft-thread this morning, but I notice that this isn't true. There are some versions of that dyanmic that are fine?!

BRB, I need to do some conceptual clarification on one of the major constraints on my dating life.

. . .

Ok. I think given some other contextual details, it might be fine for a partner to be mistaken about this, so long as that mistake wasn’t loadbearing for them? If they were depending on my approval or aprobation in their "doing the right thing".

Like, sticking to talking about EAs, many of them have “doing the most good” as something close to their identity, and my sharing my estimation of their meta-process often seems like it will crush their dreams.

(Though of course, what most often happens when I DO share is that either that it bounces off, or they have a strong reaction as they defer to my local prestige, and then they swing back to their default within a few days.

It’s hard to robustly crush people’s dreams unless they’re really working at letting them be crushed.)

I’m DEFINITELY not willing to pretend about whether or we’re fundamentally doing the same thing, or whether the thing that they're doing "on the right track" by my lights.

That category of thing is too important to allow myself to become confused about it.

But it does seem like I can imagine dynamics where it is fine if a partner basically doesn’t understand what I’m about, if they DO see me accurately along some other dimensions that are important to me.

(Teasing out the nuance here seems high leverage.)

In general, it is painful when people think that they see or understand me, but don’t, especially with people who I care about, and especially in areas that are sacred to me.

For reasons related to this, I feel more optimistic about dating a circler-type, who can see that I’m doing something unusual, and knows that she doesn’t really understand it, but values connection with me regardless, because of some virtue of mine that she CAN see clearly.

Possibly, I could get something like that with a typical EA, as well, but it seems tricker somehow.

...I think that's because EA ideology claims to be ambitious.

Like EAs, in general, want to feel like they're ambitious, or feel like they have a moral obligation to be?

(Not sure if I'll endorse that statement on reflection.)

So, there's more of a pressure to cater to their illusions.

Circlers "in" for piercing their illusions, and seeing what's real, in a way that many fewer EAs are.

This is (a fraction of) the secret subtext for why I’m filtering hard for skilled honesty. I looking for people that can hold their end of the connection so that I'm not under pressure to hold up their illusions, and we can just deal with what's real, directly, together.

Tangent: One of the better dates I’ve had was a walk with a woman who, it later turned out, had done a lot of circling.

Apropos of nothing, she said something like “man, you think really differently from most people. Dating must be really hard for you.”

She definitely didn’t understand me, but she did see me well enough to see that I was really not doing a typical thing, and to feel into what that would be like for me.

Which was relieving. A part of me could relax?

If the other person can see it, I don’t have to keep a part of myself tense to make sure not to loose track of it, or something? [Not confident that that's the mechanism, but it feels close]

Actually, now that I think about it, this might have something to do with why I often find it relieving to spend time with @diviacaroline. I think she maybe is generally good at making space for people, that for me, at least, helps me let down my guard.

The things in my psyche that I sort of generally expect to be low-key under attack, or that the world, by default, would gradually erode away, can relax with Diva.

(Diva's great.)

All this said, there IS something deeply important to me about EA, and the sort of person that is drawn to EA.

When I was younger, I expected to donate most of my money to charity (at the time, I had a rule that anytime I bought something for myself, usually educational materials, I would donate an equal amount on kiva.org), and I would go volunteering on the weekends.

I wanted to help, and I could, so I did.

That’s a thread that is very strong in EA, and it is something that I cherish, in myself and in others.

That desire to help is sacred to me, and I honor it

...and also, some version of that thing among the things that I find most attractive in women.

That, combined with selection for intelligence and much better than baseline sincerity means that EA, despite all of it’s problems is probably still the best dating pool in the world for Eli.

BUT it is definitely not the case that most EAs are, by dint of their being EAs, likely to be a good match for me.

@threadreaderapp unroll

* are "in" for