Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it's super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn't have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.

It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.

A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn't solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I'm tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.

A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people's lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren't captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like "people are rational". In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.

Oops - I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.

Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can't understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that's too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I'm thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like "obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I've done that you're pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did".

I don't think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they've hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it's often a case of thinking "this is too complicated for me" and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn't actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying "that's beyond my ability", we'd have a more chaotic world.

EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated "Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics" as "Most people can't understand complex topics", whereas you could have intended "Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics" while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I'm leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it might have been (confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.

This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.

You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don't expect to understand things. The repeated use of "most people" without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to "most people are dumb", but let's let that pass, and assume you're right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don't feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:

Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.

No. Strongly disagree. "Most people don't understand X" is a thing I could accept, and "most people feel like they can't understand X, for many Xes" seems like it could be true, but "most people can't understand X" is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of "it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to" not "this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it".

I think there may be an important difference between how you're modeling getting to the point of "I understand this topic", and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:

Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.

You seem to be thinking of "I understand this topic" as equivalent to "I have reached the state of the art in this topic", and presenting an implicit dichotomy between "I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic" and "I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me". Whereas I think there's a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to "I understand basically how this works, it doesn't seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______". And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.

As an example, let's take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it's plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event... and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They're not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it's no longer mysterious.

Or let's take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it's not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn't require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you've got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Original Economics Rap Battle!

Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who's got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron's Musings : The Economy. It's not the best, but it's an OK starting point where I can say to a friend "go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you'll get the economy better than you do now".

Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it's harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person's circle of control. But "and so I give up and rot" is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city's website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they're typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you'll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven't done anything that's actually intellectually challenging.

We can change this.

This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.

We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.

Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.

If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.

I don't actually think the change that's required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it's a change in attitude, from "the world is confusing, and I can't understand it or do anything about it", to "the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes". And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.

Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the "most people have no hope of understanding complex topics" line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it's correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don't, and I guess they're doomed.

Ok, that does clarify my mistake, and I don't have a lot to add. Except: it seems to me like the smarter someone is, the more willing they will be to trust their own judgment and ask sensible questions rather than just say "nope" if being asked to do something different than a standard relationship template. And also, the smarter someone is, the more likely they are able to manage the complications of something like nonmonogamy, or various relationship or personality quirks you might have. So, conditional on your suitable match being quite smart, the base rates of things like "will accept nonmonogamy" in the population in general won't apply. In general, make sure you're doing chained conditional probabilities, not multiplying your estimate of various traits in the population to get a small number. Weirdnesses correlate! :). And if your ideal partner is a genius alignment researcher or something similar, your geographic location is already doing a lot of filtering for you. But, probably you and your friends have accounted for all that and still got "oof, that's tough" as the result, so... good luck! You seem good, and I hope things work out for you.

Hm. I'm trying to put together several things I know into a coherent picture, and they don't fit. This suggests that maybe the dating/sexual market in your area is very different from mine, or maybe I'm missing or misunderstanding something else important.
1) You are able to satisfy your sexual needs and then some, without any long term commitment to your sexual partners, in a "basically 0 effort regime", from within your own social network.

2) But getting enough people in your pipeline to find a good relationship prospect would be high effort.

3) In your local area, men significantly outnumber women, which makes #2 harder. 

4) It's possible you have significant social blind spots which I would predict would make it harder for you to find sexual partners than the average person (not long ago you weren't certain flirting was even a real thing people do).

On my mental model of how these things usually work, if you've got lots of willing sexual partners without much effort, that means you have lots of candidate relationship partners at the same level of effort. The Venn diagram isn't a single circle, but there's significant overlap.

Anyway, I'm likely misunderstanding something important, but here's what I was thinking when I suggested it should be possible to take lots of shorts with relatively low effort: There should be a middle ground between "putting zero effort into acquisition" and "requiring very high investments." I was thinking of three regimes, zero, low, and high effort, as follows:

Zero effort: Take opportunities as they arise organically, but do not seek them out. 

Low effort: Do some basic things that are likely to be high return for the effort, to increase your chances of a match. I had in mind clearly articulating what you want and what you offer to a partner, and that you are flexible about what you're willing to offer, to the extent this is true. (an aside: many people have a mental model that if two people don't want the same things out of a relationship, they're not a match for each other, but this seems incorrect to me. What needs to match is what I want and what the other person is offering, and what they want and what I'm offering, not what I want and what they want - although us being very similar to each other in terms of what we want does simplify things. But I can increase my viable matches, all else equal and without settling for things I don't want, by being willing to accommodate a wide variety of wants in a partner.). Then, when you've clearly articulated what you value in a partner and what you offer that is of value, check it with some women to see you've not inadvertently said something that will be misinterpreted - perhaps some of the people who are willing to have non-committed sex with you would also be well-disposed enough towards you to check your work and validate the accuracy of what you're saying from an outside perspective? I recall you saying you didn't have female friends who you interact with outside of a dating context, back a while ago, which is why I suggest this rather than checking with a friend. Once you've got a really solid articulation of what you want and what you offer, actively use your social network to find a match, rather than taking opportunities as they arise organically. Tell your friends and acquaintances to recursively tell their friends and acquaintances you're looking, with a link to the articulation of what you're looking for. For the more distant social connections, consider offering a bounty, or having some way to track who has put their reputation behind you being a good human who tries to give his partners a good experience. Put some effort into reminding your social connections that you're still looking, but use word-of-mouth rather than long hours on apps.

That was a long paragraph, but really, if you hope to find a partner with specific rare characteristics without it being a matter of blind luck, you'll have to do the work of clearly articulating what you want and what you offer, and "tell your friends you're looking" isn't hard.

High effort: Try every method known, put forth full effort as if finding a relationship partner is an important priority.

Of course the usual approach would just be to take lots of shots on goal and see what sticks, but that makes a lot more sense for people for whom a "normal" relationship is very high value. 

Disagree. It makes sense if the relationship you want is very high value to you. The relationship you want doesn't have to be normal. Provided the end-state is high value and each shot is cheap, it works out that you should take lots of shots. You filter for what you want in the early stages, so that each attempt is not very costly.

Now, if you want an abnormal relationship and you don't want it that much, then yeah, go for the basically 0 effort options.

it is strategically relevant to figure out this part of my world-model.

One big example application: when it comes to dating, there's a pareto frontier of (kinds of relationships I could get and how valuable I'd find them) vs (how much effort it would take), and I notice that nearly all of that curve looks to me like the value is not worth the effort

Ah, ok. My experience was similar. For the first part of my life I was quite insecure and felt that I needed to work on myself first before attempting to partner with someone. That part is probably not similar, and may not be relevant. Once I got myself in order, I found that relationships seemed like a lot of effort for not very much benefit. It seemed to me like a lot of people were chasing after sex as if masturbation was not an option (I mean, sex is better, but not that much better, to the point where it would be worth it to put a significant portion of my available time and energy towards chasing it as a sole motivator) or validation (I speculated that people who hadn't done the work on themselves and their own emotional state that I had might feel a greater need for external validation than I do), or... something else I hadn't identified? Anyway, I went the low-effort route.  How I operationalized that was, I'd consider dating someone if they showed an interest, but wasn't going out looking for dates. And that did lead to several multi-year relationships, which mostly confirmed my sense that in retrospect they had been more effort than they were worth.

In the standard story, this is where the author goes "and then I met my current partner and everything was different, there were sunshine and rainbows and I finally understood what I had been missing, I felt something I'd never felt before, or something". But this is real life, so it doesn't follow that path, obviously. But, then I met my current partner, and the downsides in my other relationships basically don't exist in this one, the benefits are significantly greater than the costs. What I had figured were properties of most people, were actually properties of dysfunctional people (which... may be most people?), and she just... didn't have those issues. We get along great, when we have a disagreement we can talk about it like adults who are on the same team, when we need something we say so and then we each get what we need from the other. She feels like she's high-maintenance because she occasionally struggles and I get to give her emotional support in those times, and I'm like "you do not understand what the words 'high maintenance' even mean, I could do this all day, it is actively pleasant to be helpful and appreciated for helping".

Anyway, your strategic situation is different from mine because your values and personality are different from mine, but I am one data point of a person who thought that the effort required to have a relationship was generally not worth the cost, learned that with the right person this isn't true, but didn't have some kind of storybook epiphany or emotional conversion to a different sort of person. My advice would be, filter hard, and only invest in a relationship when it seems like it might be worth it, even if that's rare or doesn't ever happen. But my advice might be wrong for you.

If you have near-0 oxytocin production, my prediction is things like physical touch, hugs from people you care about, and cuddling with a romantic partner, would all be significantly less pleasant for you than for someone who has a more typical hormonal profile. The thing that most reliably triggers the "warm fuzzy" feeling I associate with love (which could also be described as a sensation focused in my chest that has ache-like elements) is cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact after sex. So what you feel, if anything, when engaging in cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact, would be informative here, without having to use a nasal spray.

I also note that it's easy to think I may not be experiencing the same things others have experienced, and difficult to dispel those thoughts because people's descriptions are often vague. I've stopped worrying about whether my experience is typical or atypical, and focus on whether I like it or not, and the same question gets asked of my partner

And I do have various signs that I’m still missing something big in a general cluster to which this topic belongs, so it seems worth digging into.

I don’t think you’re missing anything – you’ve got all the pieces, at least, within the posts you’ve written and the comments you’ve read on them, it’s just putting the pieces together into an answer that feels complete to you.

Which brings us to today’s topic: when I look at the model from The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships, and consider how I’d feel in a relationship which had all the aspects which that post talks about… I mean, it would be good, don’t get me wrong, but it still doesn’t feel that valuable.”

Your sense of what the right answer here is shouldn’t be contingent upon “would I find this value proposition as valuable as they do?” being answered in the affirmative. You are not "most people", and shouldn’t expect to respond the same way the model you have of "most people" would. The question is not “how would I feel?” but “how do they feel?”. This links back to doing the “I am inhabiting the perspective I imagine them to have” version of empathy rather than the “I am putting myself in their situation” version.

Inhabit their frame of mind fully as best you can, and see if your mental model of them generates an emotional response high in value. Then adjust your mental model of them in various ways until it both generates a high value, and generates their other responses in other circumstances. Once you’ve got a mental model of someone that generates attenuated emotional responses in you that match the ones they report, you will know what it’s like to value what they say they value (to the extent it’s possible to know how another person is feeling). 

What’s your deepest insecurity or shame around dating? An unfulfilled aspiration, a personal flaw you could never fix, an obsession too cringe to share? What would it feel like if someone not only accepted it, but was specifically drawn to it?

This fits the “value downstream of willingness to be vulnerable” model very directly, and the way it asks makes it clear that Jacob expects people to find this hypothetical very high-value. So how do we feel about it?

Voice 1: Yeah, my immediate reaction to that one is “yuck”. Someone who’s specifically drawn to something which I myself am ashamed of? That would be a reason to not date that person; unambiguous negative value add.

I’m going to try and explain what I perceive to be how and why many people value those who accept their flaws. This explanation hinges on a few key facts I’ve observed about a large subset of the population.

Fact 1: Lots of people focus their lives around social acceptance and avoiding social rejection, in a way that seems similar to me to how you focus a lot on becoming stronger. I think this comes from our history as social animals who depended on each other for survival, where social rejection often meant death.

I think your mental model of these people might come closer to being correct if whatever nonzero priority you place on gaining social acceptance and avoiding social rejection, and the priority you place on becoming stronger, switched places in the priority-ordering of the person you’re modelling. But, generally, avoiding social rejection is much higher priority than gaining social acceptance, so factor that in too.

Fact 2: Lots of people believe that if they were fully seen, fully vulnerable, fully open about all aspects of themselves, there is a good chance that something about themselves would lead to widespread rejection. 

I don’t mean they believe it as in put a high probability on it, though, most people don’t consciously think in Bayesian terms. Rather, this is a fear they have, which often but not always prevents them from doing investigation into the fear and finding out whether it’s true. Like having a phobia that prevents you from interacting with the object of the phobia, and so you never learn on a deep visceral level that the object of your phobia isn’t really dangerous. This is the sort of thing that’s going on when someone with social anxiety stays at home, and very many people have a low (sometimes not so low) level of something analogous to social anxiety.

Inhabit the mental state of someone who thinks like that, and it becomes obvious why having your deepest insecurities known and accepted is highly, highly valuable. It’s like, you live your life in silent fear, and with at least one person, you don’t have to live that way. This isn’t a “well, here’s a weakness I have, and I don’t like having weaknesses, but it’s not a priority to work on it right now, so I guess I’ll live with it while focusing on growing stronger in other ways” situation. This is a “this is an inherent thing about me that I can’t change or fix, which I either think makes me worthy of rejection by others, or I personally think is OK but I believe others will reject me if they learn of it, and I deeply care about not being rejected” situation. Many people have such deep shame about some aspects of themselves, that they can’t even think about things that would lead to thinking about the things that they’re ashamed of, whole chains of thought are off-limits, and you have to infer their insecurities from what they’re reactive to. We’re talking about the sort of thing that someone will open up about to a close friend and then say “I’ve never told that to anyone”, or “I’ve never articulated that before, I didn’t know that’s how I felt until I said it” not “this is priority 57 out of 1,040 to fix, it’s important but I’m unlikely to get to it”.

Perhaps an example will help. One thing people used to be both ashamed of and socially shamed and rejected for, was homosexuality. So, put yourself in the mind-state of someone who knows they have a same-sex attraction in the 1950’s. I think the reaction to gay men was stronger than for lesbians, so put yourself in the shoes of a gay man, who knows he’s attracted to men, this isn’t something he can change (although he may try, and fail, and feel ashamed of his failure), and all the social messages around him say it’s something to be ashamed of. From our viewpoint today in the Western world, we would just give him the message that this isn’t something to be ashamed of (this is what pride parades are about) but few people would have told him that in his time. To him, “growing stronger” would be to become heterosexual. And to find someone who liked him as he was, shared with him the thing he was ashamed of, or accepted him despite it, someone with whom he could be open about this aspect of himself without rejection, would be very valuable.

Also, a note on that original value proposition post, and a theme I see when analyzing it: It feels like asking what the value proposition is, the thing… is an incorrect question, in the same way “what do women want?” is a question without an answer – while there are general themes of things many women like, and it might be nice for young heterosexual men if they could just figure out what all women everywhere want and then do that, women are not a homogenous mass, they are different from each other, want different things, and sometimes the same woman will even (shockingly) want different things at different times. I think it’s similar with people and relationships – there is no one generalized value proposition, and the people who believe there is and they’ve figured out what everyone wants, are typical-minding. They’ve gained an insight or seen a pattern, and then over-generalized it to everyone. If you want a real answer to what the value proposition of relationships is, you should expect there to be several, perhaps many, grouped and clustered according to the psychological traits of the participants and the situations they’re in.

But, you don’t actually need to figure out all the clusters of relationship value propositions.

Your original motivation in the Value Proposition post was: 

 I had a 10-year relationship. It had its ups and downs, but it was overall negative for me. And I now think a big part of the problem with that relationship was that it did not have the part which contributes most of the value in most relationships. But I did not know that at the time. Recently, I tried asking people where most of the value in their relationships came from, got an answer, and thought “Wait, that’s supposed to be the big value prop? Not just a marginal value prop along with many others? Well shit, I was indeed largely missing that part!”.

To prevent this from being a recurring issue, you don’t have to figure out what everyone else values in their relationships, or what’s “supposed to be” the big value prop. What you need in order to prevent that from recurring is to be aware of how valuable a relationship is to you, and why, and how valuable the relationship is to the other person, and why, so that it doesn’t turn long-term net-negative for either of you. What you should be looking for isn’t a relationship that has the things that most people value, but a relationship that has what you value. If someone offers what you value and values what you offer, that’s a match, otherwise not, regardless of what anyone else is doing with their lives, or what anyone says most people value, even if what they say about most people is correct.

Maybe you don’t feel the same feelings as most people in some respect, and that’s fine. Be aware of what you are feeling, and let it be part of what guides you, and you can still find relationships that are fulfilling to you.

I will note, re: “having someone’s back” in a relationship, I feel like “I would really value it if someone else was working on AI alignment” is missing the point. You want to become stronger, but the thing is, ageing is a thing, and accidents happen. Regardless of how you may try, barring some progress on ageing, you will eventually become weaker, and the fact that ageing happens and will continue to happen is most people’s default assumption. Many people value the idea that someone likes them despite knowing their weaknesses and flaws not just to avoid social rejection, but because they feel they can trust that the relationship will continue both “in sickness and in health”. So while I would advise being aware of and monitoring when a relationship has turned net-negative to you, it’s worth noting that “I commit to you even if your flaws make this a net-negative relationship for me” is valuable to lots of people, who realize that their life will have a peak in terms of their abilities and measurable relationship value, and a period of decline before they die. They want someone who will not abandon them even when that would be the logical thing to do for a utility-maximizer. While for some people this is based on feelings, it doesn't have to be, it can be a "I made a commitment and I keep my commitments" sort of thing too, where being willing to stay committed when things are bad allows you to access higher levels of goodness when things are good.