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.
1You could be right, and thanks for the feedback. It's a low-probability speculation, and that quote is evidence against.
There's a difference between disappointment and disgust, and "can only have fun with people when he treats them as non-agents" is very different from how I think about people, and it is in my nature to try and figure out people who think very differently from me. So far I haven't got a mental model that fits John's outputs well in their entirety. My mind is still working on it in the background.
Sorry about the long posts, but I'm thinking and trying to model how things look from your perspective. EDIT TO ADD: Epistemic status: Speculation.
Hypothesis: You're like, 30-40 points higher IQ than me, which would put you around 60 points above average (ballpark figures in each case).
If true, that would explain some things. There's a certain intelligence level that I round down to "basically not intelligent", and a certain intelligence level that I round up to "too smart for me to really understand things they find intellectually engaging unless they try really hard to dumb things down, or I spend hours where they spent minutes, so I can't really have a conversation with them about it" - and in either case, it's hard for me to see distinctions among people too far from my own intelligence-level in either direction. And the same is true for everyone, from what I've read. The barrier to mutual understanding seems to kick in around 30-40 IQ points. I understand that for people at a certain low IQ level, "this person went to community college" = "this person is really smart", with the same reaction to "this person has a doctorate in physics" or "this person is the President". And I can talk to and connect with people who are around average, as well as people who are pretty smart, while I find it hard to really put myself in the shoes of someone who's significantly below average in intelligence, and there are people I tag with "too smart for me to really understand", although relatively few, and I can still understand the parts of them that, ahem, aren't particularly intelligent :D.
I picture what the world would look like if I was smarter, and thus concepts that took some prodding or prompting for me to get them (but I did get them) just seem obvious from age 5, the way utilitarianism did for me before I knew other people had thought of it and it had a name. Apparently this is something most people are only introduced to in university? Anyway, picturing what the world would look like if I moved up the intelligence scale, the thoughts that output sound like your posts. Most people are basically cats, if you expect to be treated like an adult you have to be trying to have a counterfactual impact. And my model of you as someone well outside the normal intelligence range predicts that my earlier post saying "counterfactual thinking isn't something most people get without being taught" would get a response like "yes, exactly, most people are basically cats, and I've just downgraded my estimate of your intelligence". The first part of which is a similar error to "a community college graduate and a top-level physicist are basically the same".
The more carefully-worded version of "counterfactual thinking isn't something most people get without being taught", would be something like "counterfactual thinking isn't something most people do without being taught, except in rare and fairly stereotypical circumstances, like 'I was just almost in a car accident' or 'what would my life be like today if I had stayed with my first love?'". I mean, yes, they do basic counterfactuals like "if I eat the cake I will get fat, if I don't eat the cake I won't get fat" (which, I note, cats do not), but thinking about the higher-order effects like "if I buy the cake that has this effect on the overall economy, and the world as a whole looks different 6 months from now in these subtle ways" is a thought-pattern most people have to be taught - but can be taught.
If your situation is that you can't differentiate between average-intelligence people, below-average-intelligence people, and cats, because they all just don't get things that seem obvious to you, and once they don't get one obvious thing you worry about what other obvious things they will or won't get and they just become unpredictable beings you don't understand very well... then probably my encouragement to treat more people less like cats isn't going to work for you.
I think it's important to bring the distinction I initially missed, about what you mean by moral agency, into this conversation. From your comment in the other post:
I think this misses the distinction I'd consider relevant for moral agency.
I can put a marble on a ramp and it will roll down. But I have to set up the ramp and place the marble; it makes no sense for me to e.g. sign a contract with a marble and expect it to make itself roll down a ramp. The marble has no agency.
Likewise, I can stick a nonagentic human in a social environment where the default thing everyone does is take certain courses and graduate in four years, and the human will probably do that. I can condition a child with rewards and punishments to behave a certain way, and the child will probably do so. Like the marble, both of these are cases where the environment is set up in such a way that the desired outcome is the default outcome, without the candidate "agent" having to do any particular search or optimization to make the outcome happen.
What takes agency - moral agency - is making non-default things happen. (At least, that's my current best articulation.) Mathematically, I'd frame this in terms of couterfactuals: credit assignment mostly makes sense in the context of comparison to counterfactual outcomes. Moral agency (insofar as it makes sense at all in a physically-reductive universe) is all about thinking of a thing as being capable of counterfactual impact.
This seems defensible, but nonstandard. Under a definition of "moral agency" that relies on counterfactual credit assignment, a lot of things that would normally be considered the actions of a moral agent acting goodly, wouldn't count. (Unless I'm misunderstanding, in which case, please correct that misunderstanding.)
Examples:
1. I have an opportunity to cheat on my spouse, or do something else society clearly codes as wrong. I choose not to.
Standard interpretation: Good choice, have a cookie. You are the sort of person I can collaborate with.
Counterfactual credit analysis: Doesn't seem very agentic. Most of the credit here goes to the society around you and your parents, who taught you through various forms of reinforcement to decide in that way in that kind of situation. Maybe you get a little credit for actually doing the expected thing when the opportunity arose, but very little. You're basically a cat. A good cat rather than a bad cat, I guess?
2. I want there to be fewer people dying of things they don't need to die of. So I read up GiveWell's stuff, and donate a large amount to each of their top recommended charities.
Standard interpretation: Again, good job, not many people do this at present and it's obviously helpful on the object level for people to behave in this way.
Counterfactual credit analysis: ~No points awarded. Everyone with lots of money is aware of GiveWell now, their top charities are not funding constrained (at least that's what I understood to be the case a few years ago, don't rely on this statement as fact without double-checking), and if you didn't donate someone else would.
3. As a kid, my brother dies of cancer, so I vow to do what I can to make sure that happens to fewer people. (This didn't happen to me, but it did happen to a friend). I go study hard for decades and become a doctor specializing in the kind of cancer my brother died of (my friend did not do this, but he went a significant way down that path). Through various medical means, my actions directly prevent many deaths during my career.
Standard interpretation: Mission accomplished? You did what you set out to do, stayed true to the goals of your childhood self, and should look back on your life with happiness and pride.
Counterfactual credit analysis: The 80,000 hours career path analysis which basically said "the counterfactual impact of becoming a doctor is low, try and do something neglected" is where the concept of counterfactual thinking clicked for me. Few points awarded, clearly falls within the "just being a marble doing the expected thing" category of life-choices.
I think disgust at people who aren't agentic in terms of thinking about and optimizing for their counterfactual impact is the wrong move.
Background information that informs this view: Most people (not most people here, but most people generally) will have a reaction to "you're not really agentic and may get a disgust reaction from me unless you're optimizing for counterfactual impact" with either a blank confused stare because they're not familiar with the relevant concepts, or something like "you mean like speculating about how things would be different if the Nazis won WW2? What does that have to do with whether i should cheat on my wife, or get credit for not doing so?".
In this situation, most people are like the woman with the nail in her head, except she doesn't know she has a nail in her head and isn't going to be defensive about it unless you start telling her she's a terrible/stupid person or cat who you are better than and you can't work with her, for having a nail in her head and not doing anything about it. The standard person's reaction to counterfactual reasoning, once it's explained why that's relevant, might be "well that definitely changes some of my life-plans", which would be like the woman going "hey look, you're right, there is a nail in there, thanks!" Although consistently updating how you think to incorporate and apply a new concept in all areas where it's relevant rather than just applying it in its original context is also a skill that needs to be taught to many people, not something that happens automatically.
People who follow standard rules in standard situations are perfectly good collaborators in those situations. Also, reacting with disgust to those people regardless of their behaviour destroys the incentive structure which makes them good collaborators. People who don't cheat on their spouse and do become oncologists should get a cookie, even though those are standard things to do with a low counterfactual impact. And there is a material difference between someone who is a doctor and someone who is a nonfunctional alcoholic, in terms of how grown-up and reliable they are, and that difference should be recognized, rather than putting them both in the same bucket as a cat.
Another counterpoint: On my understanding of how physics works (which admittedly may be wrong in important ways) we don't have free will, there are no counterfactual universes, and we are all 0% actually-agentic. Your thoughts at moment t are a result of the various physical forces operating on the molecules of your brain, which strictly depend on the state of the system at t-1, and backward in time to the beginning of time. When pushed to the limit, "how much credit for this outcome goes to an agentic individual, vs. to environmental influences and marbles doing what marbles do?" has a correct answer "0% to the individual". Any choice of how much agency to grant someone in your mind seems kind of an arbitrary choice, unless you believe the universe is doing something other than unfolding according to physical laws, and our choices can in actual fact change the future. "Agency" is a useful component to a model of the interaction between humans and animals, not the territory of base reality. And picking "only agency that requires familiarity with concepts most people don't have familiarity with counts" seems like a choice that will have negative systematic effects.
With all that said... I agree with approximately all of this, from Thane, below:
The main impact is on the ability to coordinate with/trust/relax around that person. If they're well-modeled as an agent, you can, to wit, model them as a game-theoretic agent: as someone who is going to pay attention to the relevant parts of any given situation and continually make choices within it that are consistent with the pursuit of some goal. They may make mistakes, but those would be well-modeled as the foibles of being a bounded agent.
On the other hand, people who can't be modeled as agents (in a given context) can't be expected to behave in this way. They may make decisions based on irrelevant parts of the situations, act in inconsistent ways, and can't be trusted not to go careening in some random direction in response to random stimuli. Sort of like, ahem, an LLM.
Note that I think it isn't a binary "There Are Two Types of People" thing.
What you in your post mean when you say "grown up" in this sentence:
Sometimes they mean they want to be treated as moral agents (i.e. treated as a grown-up, rather than a child or a cat).
Seems to me similar to what Thane is pointing at with "game-theoretic agent", and what Harry in HPMOR would call a sane adult.
And, you get to choose who you will treat as an adult. If someone wants you to empathize with them, just do so, it's an almost-costless action that many people value. But if they want you to treat them as an adult, it's fine to say "sorry, there's a nail in your head and you should know it's there and want to remove it but apparently you don't, and under this circumstance I find it difficult to take you seriously". Not in those exact words, as that will quite often be perceived as an attack or extremely rude, but the message "there are requirements/standards if you want me to treat you as an adult, here is what they are, you're not currently meeting them" is useful information for people who want you to treat them as adults. Basically, the message "in order to be treated as a Very Serious Adult, you have to have your life and your self in a certain degree of order" is standard, even people who want to be treated with more respect than you're giving them may get it.
Ok, I see your point and acknowledge that that is a good and valuable distinction. And, the reality is that most people are just responding to their environment most of the time, and you would class them as non-agents during those times, morally speaking.
But, unlike if people were literally marbles, you can sign a contract with most people and expect them to follow through on most of their commitments, where in practice there's nothing preventing them from breaching contract in a way that harms you and helps them in the short term. So they don't have no agency. And in small daily choices which are unconstrained or less-constrained by the environment, where the default option is less clear, people do make choices that have counterfactual impact. Maybe not on civilization-spanning scale (it would be a very chaotic world if reality was such that everyone correctly thought they could change the world in major ways and did so) but on the scale of their families, friend-groups and communities? Sure, quite often. And those choices shape those groups.
So my opinion is that humans in general:
a) Aren't very smart.
b) Mostly copy those around them, not trying to make major changes to how things are.
c) When they do try to make changes, the efforts tend to be copied from someone else rather than figured out on their own.
d) But are faced with small-scale moral choices on a daily basis, where their actions are not practically constrained, and whether they cooperate or defect will influence the environment for others and their future selves. It is in those contexts where they display moral agency, to the extent that it is present for them.
Very few people are doing things like thinking through the game theory or equilibria effects of their actions, or looking at the big picture of the civilization we live in and going "how is this good/bad, and what changes can we make to get it to a better place?" in a way that's better than guessing or copying their friends, with the end result of a civilization that thrashes around mostly blindly. If you're disgusted with anyone who is not actively trying to remake the world in at least some respect, you're going to be disgusted with almost everyone. But back to moral agency not being binary: the small-scale stuff matters, and standard adult humans are more morally agentic even when using your understanding of "moral agency" than cats are. I would also say, it's good for people who are unable to accurately predict the long-term consequences of their actions to just copy what seems to have worked in past and respond to incentives, just play the role of a marble unless they're really sure that their deviation from expected behaviour is good on net. And there are very few who are good enough predictors that they can look at their situations, choose to go uphill instead of down, and pick good hills to die on. Most of them will have grown up in families not composed of such people, and will need to have it pointed out to them that they have and should use more agency.
As an example: It is not at all difficult to talk to your elected representative. They frankly like it (in my experience) when an engaged citizen engages with them. This is a thing anyone can do. When I suggest to someone that this is a thing that might help solve a problem they have (for example, let's say their interaction with a government agency has gone poorly and there's clearly a broken process), it is often clear that this is not something they have even considered as being inside their possibility-space. This doesn't make these people the equivalent of human marbles by their nature. A simple "hey, you can just do things to make the world different, such as this thing for example" is often enough for them to generalize from. Sometimes the idea takes a few examples/repetitions to take root, though.
Now that I'm clearer on what you mean by moral agency, I'm not sure why you would ever expect that to be widespread among the population, and have to suspend the belief that the person you're interacting with is a moral agent. It's just straightforwardly true that almost nobody is trying to achieve a really non-default outcome. Any society composed mostly of people trying to change it "for the better" according to their understanding of better, which involves achieving non-default outcomes, rather than just going along with the system they were born into, would have collapsed and gotten invaded by a society that could coordinate better. At our current intelligence levels, anyway. A society composed of very smart people (relative to the current baseline) could probably come to explicit, explained, consciously chosen agreement from each individual on a lot of things and use that as a basis for coordination while leaving people free to explore the possibility-space of available social changes and propose new social agreements based on what they find, but the society we've actually got, cannot. So we've got to use conformity as a coordination mechanism instead.
Taking this back to empathy for a second: It is usually correct (has better effects) for most people not to swim against the social current. Yes, our society is an evolved system with many problems that would not exist if it were (correctly) intelligently designed instead, but that doesn't mean most people can just start trying to make changes, without breaking the system and making things much worse. Those who do the default thing, shouldn't be the subject of disgust, even if they're one of the rare people who wouldn't break things by mucking about with them. If understanding that someone just went with the flow provokes disgust in you, I think it's reasonable for you to ask whether, in that person's case, they really ought to have done otherwise, and also, whether it's reasonable for them to have known that, given the society we live in doesn't teach or encourage the kind of moral agency you respect to its members (for obvious reasons of social stability).
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.