I vaguely remember seeing it on wikipedia? Not confident, that whole section was my current gestalt understanding and recollection, and could easily be wrong.

Unfortunately, even for people with normal oxytocin function the effects of the nasal spray are typically described as "subtle". I'm moderately skeptical that the nasal delivery route has any effect at all on the usual oxytocin circuits.

That said, I did try some, and had a couple other people try it at the same time. All reports were within-expected-error-bars of "no effect"; nobody experienced anything particularly dramatic.

Indeed, that will be the next step if and when I decide to invest more effort into nailing this down.

Heroin clearly destroys too much of what you already care about. Maybe you're worried the same thing might be true of companionate love?

This is indeed my concern, and I think you are radically underestimating the extent to which oxytocin typically causes people to sacrifice their non-oxytocin values.

For example, about half the population decides to have one or more kids. That's a decision whose emotional motivation is usually mainly oxytocin IIUC. It also, notoriously, typically takes over one's entire life for a decade or more, causing everything else to be thrown under the bus. The whole "midlife crisis" phenomenon is, to my eye, mainly people throwing everything but oxytocin under the bus for a decade, then burning out and needing to relearn to embrace their non-oxytocin values.

Another example: I do not at all buy that most people (or at least most straight males) are able to avoid the trap of money-hungry romantic partners. Here's an infographic:

Emotional burden is harder to measure, but it again sure seems to me like a majority of people are pretty darn emotionally burdensome. If someone has even such basic skills as "reliably notice when they're hangry or tired or PMSing and go relax rather than being a pain in the ass", that already puts them in the upper tiers of the population. And without that sort of skill, people are typically deeply unpleasant to be around something like 20% of the time.

A less confident guess, informed more by my own experiences: I suspect that oxytocin typically pushes people to be a lot less ambitious, in general. Most other value-components either satisfice quickly (e.g. food), or push toward a lot of ambition. Oxytocin is one huge value-component which drives people to sink a large fraction of their attention and resources into local things which don't pay off in anything much greater. It's an easier alternative outlet to ambition. People can feel basically-satisfied with their mediocre performance in life so long as they feel that loving connection with the people around them, so they're not very driven to move beyond mediocrity.

Never having had the thing is importantly different from losing the thing.

From my perspective, oxytocin makes people do stuff that looks really dumb according to my own values. A central example here is sticking with a romantic partner who sucks up tons of money and/or requires tons of unpleasant emotional maintenance. To my eyes (i.e. without the oxytocin) this seems like a terrible idea. But I see people in those sorts of relationships seeming overall satisfied, presumably because the oxytocin is providing a big positive chunk of value.

That sort of thing does not make me particularly eager to turn on oxytocin signalling for myself, even if I could. It's analogous to heroin, from my perspective: sure, it would change my values so that I feel good while in terrible-according-to-my-current-values situations, but I do not want that.

From the top:

Are our Values the real-world things that trigger our feelings, or the feelings themselves? (If the latter, we'll be able to artificially trigger them at negligible cost and with no negative side effects, unlike today.)

Not quite either of those, but if we're speaking loosely then the real-world things that trigger our feelings. Definitely not the feelings themselves.

"We Don’t Get To Choose Our Own Values" will be false, so that part will be irrelevant. How does this affect your arguments/conclusions?

It's already false today for things like e.g. heroin; drugs already make it possible to overwrite our values if we so choose. I would reason about future opportunities to overwrite our values in much the same way I reason about heroin today (and in much the same way which I think most people reason about heroin today).

Even today, Goodness-as-memetic-egregore can (and have) heavily influence our Values, through the kind of mechanism described in Morality is Scary. (Think of the Communists who yearned for communism so much that they were willing to endure extreme hardship and even torture for it.) This seems like a crucial part of the picture that you didn't mention, and which complicates any effort to draw conclusions from it.

Yup, I totally buy that that happens, including in more ordinary day-to-day ways. At the point where a meme has integrated itself into the feeling-triggers directly, I'm willing to say "ok this meme has become a part of this person's actual values". As with heroin, this is a thing which one typically wants to avoid under one's current values, but once it's happened there's no particular reason to undo it (at least from the first-person perspective; obviously people try to overwrite others' values all the time).

My own perspective is that what you call Human Values and Goodness are both potential sources (along with others) of "My Real Values", which I'll only be able to really figure out after doing or learning a lot more philosophy (e.g., to figure out which ones I really want to, or should, keep or discard, or how to answer questions like the above). In the meantime, my main goals are to preserve/optimize my option values and ability to eventually do/learn such philosophy, and don't do anything that might turn out to be really bad according to "My Real Values" (like deny some strong short-term desire, or commit a potential moral atrocity), using something like Bostrom and Ord's Moral Parliament model for handling moral uncertainty.

At some point, somewhere in this process, one needs to figure out what counts as evidence about value, i.e. what crosses the is-ought gap. And I would be real damn paranoid about giving a memetic egregore de-facto write access to the "ought" side of the is-ought gap.

Suppose I'm a sadist who derives a lot of pleasure/reward from torturing animals, but also my parents and everyone else in society taught me that torturing animals is wrong. According to your posts, this implies that my Values = "torturing animals has high value", and Goodness = "don't torturing animals", and I shouldn't follow Goodness unless it actually lets me better satisfy my values better long-term, in other words allows me to torture more animals in the long run. Am I understanding your ideas correctly?

[...]

Assuming I am understanding you correctly, this would be a controversial position to say the least, and counter to many people's intuitions or metaethical beliefs.

I'd flag that there's still instrumental considerations, i.e. other people assign (a lot of) negative value to animals being tortured and I probably want to still be friends with those people so I might want to avoid the torture for practical reasons.

That said, steelmanning: in a world where basically all humans enjoyed torturing animals, yes, those alternate-humans should-according-to-their-own-values torture lots of animals. Obviously that is controversial, but also-obviously it's one of those things that's controversial mostly for stupid reasons (i.e. people really want to find some reason why their own values are the One True Universal Good), not for good reasons.

Meta: I've been trying to keep up inkhaven's "write a post every day in November" assignment. And for this particular post, that meant writing with a fever of 101.1F, with my whole body sore and exhausted, and a nasty headache. So, uh... this post is perhaps not the best possible version of itself.

I personally, as a child, looked at a map of the world and went "huh, it sure looks like these continents over here kinda fit in over there, maybe they moved?", before I had learned of continental drift.

(For some reason I remember the occasion quite well, like I remember the spot where I was sitting at the time.)

Yes.

Man, I'm surprised I forgot to work a link to that in to the post. Thanks!