I approve of the general goals behind this post. Affection is great! That said, it sounds kind of like it was written on ecstasy. And I'm not sure the exact approach will work generally. #3 in particular is a little badly worded - how far over one's limits is one expected to tolerate encroachment? How many times?
I think it makes sense to consider what we want to use from ask culture versus guess culture here. If I like and want to hug everyone at a gathering except one person, and that one person asks for a hug after I've hugged all the other people and deliberately not hugged them, that's gonna be awkward no matter what norms we have unless I have a reason like "you have sprouted venomous spines". But if someone I'm perfectly comfortable with longs longingly to pet my long hair, and doesn't ask, this is indeed a sadly missed gain. Because my hair is awesome.
I approve of the general goals behind this post. Affection is great! That said, it sounds kind of like it was written on ecstasy. And I'm not sure the exact approach will work generally.
That's an excellent summary.
For my part I'd never dream of saying or declaring implementation of anything remotely like such a protocol. Heck, I might consider saying something as gushy sounding as "#1" to a partner I had been dating for 6 months but even then I'd use phrasing that was a bit more mutual and engaging and sounded less like "I'm a Needy Carebear".
But abhorrence to making any declaration myself aside I have no particular problem with interacting with others who were trying to implement such a protocol. If Nyan (or someone else who isn't a jackass) really wants a hug then sure, I'll give him a hug. To be honest I don't know what else he has in mind with his whole "loving relationships" and "optimal affection" idea. I suppose he can hold my hand if he wants to. Whatever, I hear they do that sort of thing in other cultures.
...#3 in particular is a little badly worded - how far over one's limits is one expected to tolerate encroachment? How many t
Y'all might enjoy Ted Chiang's story Liking what you see that explores the consequences of modifying your brain to stop evaluating other people's attractiveness.
The obvious problem with your 'protocol' is that affiliative behavior is strongly linked to status considerations. Humans seek to affiliate with high-status, attractive or otherwise impressive folks, and affiliating to others in an overzealous or seemingly "desparate" way can lead to an unconcious loss in status, even if nobody is overtly "punish[ed] or hate[d]" for their behavior.
Edit: A generally accepted workaround to the above problem is known as "qualifying": if I find out something about you which would plausibly count as 'impressive', then I can lightly compliment you on that, and pretend that it really explains why I'm affiliating with you as someone who's impressive. It's really quite transparent, but it allows both counterparties to affiliate to one another while "saving face" with each other and any third parties.
I'm struggling a little to apply this to the post's concept; could you help me come up with an example?
Look at #1:
I want to optimize the level of affection between us; I probably want more of your love.
Saying that kind of thing will make the speaker have lower status after the utterance than before... unless they are somehow masterfully countersignalling. Even then it is something that is extremely hard to countersignal so it is almost always just a status lowering move.
I don't generally think about status, so I didn't catch that one.
You went through the process of creating a protocol for optimizing affection and status considerations didn't cross your mind? Wow! I can't decide whether that state of mind would be relaxing, completely crippling or perhaps a little of both.
I've been in spaces where people were comfortable with verbally and physically expressing affection for each other (mostly in groups of young Quakers). It is delicious when it works.
The groups where I've seen it work have been largely female. At least in the US, it's socially easier for women to be affectionate with each other. Personally, I feel a lot more comfortable with physical closeness if I believe it won't turn into something sexual, so I'm most comfortable cuddling with straight women and gay men. It's hard for me to imagine how LW gatherings will turn into that kind of space, but there may be ways I'm not seeing.
I'm not sure how to build such spaces. I think it helps to have a few people who have the courage to start a hug, etc. which helps establish it as the culture. But I'm also not sure how to get people to be honest about their boundaries. I was in one such group of mostly liberal North Americans who were fine with hugging and cuddling, but the one Bangladeshi guy was worried sick his parents would find out he had hugged girls. And there wasn't a comfortable way for him to tell us that until he knew us better.
It seems to me that it would be good if I could figure out a way of getting the sorts of absurd things I tell people digested without coming across as insane, since the impression of insanity obviously lasts even after people have assimilated the now obviously reasonable things. Feel free to email me pointers at my gmail (michael.vassar@gmail.com).
I know I create parsing problems, which is part of why I generally focus on F2F, where people much more frequently do understand.
Meta note: Instead of saying "as rationalists, we can do X better", could we just say "we can do X better"? I think in general if you want an idea to spread it's good to require as few prerequisites as possible, and I don't see how any of the LW cluster of ideas is a prerequisite for telling people that you're comfortable with them displaying affection towards you.
I find it helpful for certain things to remind myself that I am a rationalist.
Keep your identity small. "Being a rationalist" is not a reason to draw any conclusion or make any decision. You just draw the conclusions that are right, because they are right, and make decisions that are good, because they are good, not because "you are a rationalist".
If therefore "being a rationalist" isn't playing any epistemic or decision making role, it should be abandoned as a meaningless label.
Back when the DC meetups were first starting, we realized that we wanted to build up friendships faster than normal. One person (I think it was atucker) suggested that we start hugging each other, because that naturally installs feelings of affection for each other. It's only a data point of 1, but it seemed to work very well in making us more comfortable with each other.
I'm really, really uncomfortable with formalizing these aspects of social behavior. I prefer affection and love to emerge slowly and naturally. Although it is absolutely opposite of your intentions, and I recognize that fact, I'm still very strongly reminded of Love Bombing. Your concept just transmits a really phyggish vibe for me.
This post in no way is meant to be a criticism (I don't see why your rules shouldn't work), I just wanted to express the emotions that emerged when reading your post - which seem kind of important, given the topic.
I was a member of a Tibetan Buddhist group for about 3 years. I didn't feel very comfortable for the last half year. I don't think I can accurately sum up all my experiences, but the part that is relevant to this discussion:
- Local groups strive for harmony and affection via common activities and lots of physical contact (hugging etc.). This isn't quite as formalized as you propose, but still a deliberate part of the group structure.
- This does work rather fast, and raises happiness (for a time for me, indefinitely for others).
- Unfortunately, this also made it emotionally unpleasant for me to voice dissent/argue when I disagreed with something, especially when it was about something where I was the minority.
- As a consequence, today I prefer to develop such bonds slowly.
I'm not sure how this applies to your proposed structure, but I fear that it's implementation may lead to the above, simply because people like the same things you do. You do not need to force them to participate (neither was I), but they do so out of their own free will. The negative consequence I described may still happen, if many people adopt your rules and develop Affection for a large group of people they don't know well quickly.
Don't forget that some people will actually be hurt if you hug them, most likely because they suffered from a traumatic incident in the past.
I have not suffered from a traumatic incident, and would still have trouble handling that much emotion.
I'm just curious, is there any gender involved here? From the stats, I'm assuming you're male, and I'm also assuming that most of the people you want to be more affectionate with are males. But then you threw in, "if I tell my friend that I love her or try to hold her hand," which confused me.
It's pretty cool that you are a friendship slut platonically promiscuous less likely than average to reject someone approaching you for affection. Advertising this might reduce your status, but you'll probably get more hugs overall. I say, go ahead and publicly spell out your unusual openness (by telling people your rules, etc).
If Eliezer's art of solving confusing questions is the basic punch of rationality, and fighting akrasia and becoming personally effective is the basic front kick, I would like to master the loving hug. Here is a simple protocol to help us build stronger relationships and stronger communities:
In the spirit of Crocker's rules, I give you Nyan's rules: I hereby declare that you are allowed to love me. I will not judge you or hate you or stop talking to you. I will recieve and return your affection happily and gently let you know if you push my limits.
What's this all about? Here is the story:
I have strong feels of love and friendship for some of you that I met at minicamp, and some of you that I know from my meetup. On reflection, I see that I want to be deeply in (reciprocal) love with as many people as possible. I look forward to a future when I am smart enough to be in wonderful friendly love with all N billion of us.
I don't just want more feels, I want to be able to express them, too. I want to be able to tell you all that I love you and hold your hands and hug and cuddle and generally be nice without anyone feeling awkward or creeped out or conflicted.
Happiness research and personal experience suggests that more affection and closer relationships are generally a good thing. Mammals seem to like curling up together. Unwelcome affection is no good tho; the utility of affection seems to drop off past some point where people start to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. I think if we tried, we would find that there is tremendous value in finding the right level of affection in our relationships. The problem at this point is how quickly the utility of affection drops off, and how unwilling people are to be explicit about their preferences here.
Currently, I feel like if I tell my friend that I love him or try to hold his hand, and he is not interested, this at best creates an awkward situation, and at worst irrevocably damages the friendship. It is a violation of fun theory to have a misstep that is this expensive. The usual method prescribed to deal with this is to be able to work up the curve slowly and get a feel for when you are reaching the limit. The location of the optimum also moves up, so building rapport like this is a pretty important skill. IMO, tho, it is too expensive to do things this way if we can avoid it.
We should be able to find and operate at the optimal level of affection with minimal cost. In the current social dynamic with my current skill level, even probing for information is so scary that I don't bother to play the game.
Many percieved social risks are imaginary, but if this one is, no one is being explicit about its non-existance, so it still scares me. If it scares me, it probably scares others. There may even be people who want to be more affectionate with me, and aren't able to work up enough courage to try. That makes me really sad.
This is all made worse by love being mixed up with romance. Romance brings a whole other bag of grenades to the love party. If, in some case, full-on romance is uncomfortable or inconvienient for someone, that doesn't mean the optimal level of affection is none. We can probably still have hugs and cuddles. Note that this is just a consequence of the optimal-affection idea.
So there are two things we need to do, I think, to create a better social dynamic in which we can optimize affection and relationships faster and better. We need to be more comfortable with being explicit about what we are comfortable with, and we need to try to flatten the tail of our affection->utility curve so that overstepping comfort limits is not such a disaster. This means not punishing people for overstepping the bounds the first time, just gently nudging them back to your comfort zone.
At minicamp, there were a couple moments where a few of us semi-deliberately made these changes. IMO, the result was huge; we probed each other's comfort boundaries and built loving relationships very quickly, and all came out of it happier. At least that's what it felt like to me. This is one of the sources of strong feels of love and friendship that I mentioned above. This post is an attempt to formalize what happened there into a useful protocol.
Human social dynamics is one of the most complex systems in the known universe. Hacking it naively is bound to hit some pitfall or other. Even so, it is our system, and we are rationalists; I think we can do better here.
The naive approach is to do like radical honesty and start expressing love honestly when you feel it. Even if this were explicitly endorsed and enforced by the group (good luck overcoming that momentum), it still has two big issues: It requires way too much courage, and punishes people who are not comfortable with saying they are uncomfortable. This is the same sort of thing, except worse, that sinks radical honesty. Forcing the new rules on people who are not ready is bad.
The solution, I think is the same as the solution to these problems for radical honesty: transform the intervention from a something forced on people who are not ready to an opt-in protocol where people who are ready invite others to initiate interactions under the new system. Radical honesty becomes Crocker's rules, really awkward affection becomes Nyan's rules (or something).
(if anyone has a better name...)
So here are the rules:
What does this get us? If this works as well as I think it should, it will become a major piece of the group rationality puzzle. Rationalists should be able to build strong emotional relationships faster and better than any Dark Side cult. Is this going to work? I think it is at least worth testing.
I feel so much love just waiting for an opportunity to come out. There are many people I would love to be more open and affectionate with, but don't want to risk making them uncomfortable or ruining a friendship. I can't force this on them; all I can do is do for others what I would like them to do for me.
So if you like, try this out at your meetups. Lets see if it works. It seems safe enough, so I'll be the first to awkwardly stick my neck out and say it:
It is safe to express love or be affectionate with me, really, I won't bite.