In crafting my original world modelling of love, there was a blindspot due to the significant age of my relationships. Looking back in the long run, the power of shared experiences looks like a log curve, but the reality is that different experiences have different power and it only looks...
Introduction Note: this was originally published on Medium, since I'm putting a bunch of other related posts here I thought it best to migrate the original as well. For over a decade now I’ve had a concept milling around my head that has been subtly influencing my behaviours. Perhaps formulating...
In crafting my original world modelling of love, there was a blindspot due to the significant age of my relationships. Looking back in the long run, the power of shared experiences looks like a log curve, but the reality is that different experiences have different power and it only looks that way if you are thinking about your experiences unconsciously sorting them by power rather than chronologically.
The general principle of the curve in the original article holds true, that as time in a relationship progresses you are more likely to have exhausted the powerful experiences earlier and gains will diminish (but are worth continuing to invest in to fight against decay!); but... (read 1012 more words →)
Thanks, that's interesting. One point I'm trying to work through is the importance of salience/ability to imagine others - i.e. is your 'autistic-traits friend' simply not able to hold a salient picture of people/animals outside of their social circle.
So while their gap between 'any given person' and 'person I actually know' is minimal; they simply are not able to imagine 'an abstract person' so their love of people outside their social circle is zero. Similarly, if someone in their social circle moves away or something, that person is no longer salient and is effectively excluded from all considerations of love (until the friend is prompted to think of them).
Conversely: since you are thinking about effective altruism, the potential recipients are salient to you rather than 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind'.
To fit it into the 'factors' I consider above, 'shared-experiences' are all forgotten and set to zero.
Thanks for the input, a lot of this writing is figuring out what love is to me. Where I ended up was that to care for someone or something else's welfare is to love them/it and then using love as a basis for allocating resources at my disposal (I ended up going down a rabbit hole on this one).
I found this to be a more comprehensive model and truer to my experience of love than the way I've seen it commonly referred to in media where it is almost a mind trap of 'obsessive thoughts' about another (much like lust but not necessarily tied to sex).
Note: this was originally published on Medium, since I'm putting a bunch of other related posts here I thought it best to migrate the original as well.
For over a decade now I’ve had a concept milling around my head that has been subtly influencing my behaviours. Perhaps formulating a Theory of Love is not something you’d expect coming from a a university student studying macroeconomics and drawing too many AD-AS curves, but its staying power and adaptability has continued to surprise me over the years and in the spirit of Tyler Cowen’s advice on writing a book I felt like I had to get this out of my system.
In essence the concept... (read 6826 more words →)