I need some relationship advice. I suggested 125% but my wife won’t budge from 10%. Is this normal? How did it go when you had this conversation with your romantic partner?
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Playing hypothetical games like this are poisonous to a relationship. My advice is to not do that kind of thing anymore.
I had a boyfriend who early on told me if he won the lottery, I would no longer be part of his life.
Then guess what happened? I got a ridiculous family inheritance and he was no longer part of my life.
Shit, if I won the lottery my wife would be the only one who’d be part of my life. Fuck everyone else, we’re disappearing into the ether to enjoy fucking around the world.
THAT’S what love is.
I love this for him.
I think they expose problems more so than create them.
Yea I would have this conversation with my partner but as a joke that we’d both find amusing.
This is surely satire right? Why’s everyone taking it so seriously?
You can never be sure on the Internet. Plus, I know there are people who think like this; my mom did something similar to my dad when I was a kid. When they were first dating she told him she didn’t want to be tied down, a sentiment that he thought was long over by the time they got married. Much to his surprise, she was angry that he wasn’t more accepting when he caught her cheating. Decades later, she still claims that she was entirely justified, and that my dad is an asshole for getting angry at her.
STA
People need to communicate these things. If either myself or my partner wants to be with someone else, it is discussed. It allows everyone to make an informed decision going forward and no one is betrayed. Only time this ever happened with us, we were with the same person
Sorry to hear that bro.
I wish people who thought like this were just upfront about wanting non-monogamy rather than sneaking around and causing pain and strife for those around then.
Like, my wife (and partner) practice ethical non-monogamy and have fire years. If one of us wants to stay outside of our thruple, we talk about it and discuss how we feel, and then make a decision everyone is happy with. There are times where something is denied (last one was because of a bad partner she ended up breaking up with a month later, who went full ‘you can’t fire me I quit’ on her), but we all work through it.
Communicate is not that hard…
If this tweet is real then I would 100% expect something like this from this guy.
Edit: I mean I think Yudkowsky is being sincere. The lemmy OP is clearly a jokeSomeone else commented that this dude often posts stuff like this and it’s not satire…
Yikes…
I find the quantification of very emotional topics not very helpfull in the long run:
What counts as “10% better”?
Do you know if the number, should it even exist, stays consistent? Or that you got the “correct one”?
My advice:
Find out what you seek out in a relathionship, what you want to avoid, and then talk about it.
Because “10% better” could just mean the other guy is driving more carefull with the family-car, doesnt chew with an open mouth or shaves more often.
Yeah the idea that somebody has a percentage rating of quality is genuine lunacy. It’s also sociopathic to overlook that being fond of someone despite their flaws or “lower rating”.
This seems to be the whole point. Neg the other person and make them question their own worth. “Oh, no! I’d better keep them happy. Is THAT GUY 10% better than me!?”
If they chew open mouthed and are not amenable to change that is a straight up deal breaker, sorry not sorry, my misophonia doesn’t leave room to compromise on that.
I got uncomfortable just reading ‘chew open mouthed’ shudder
Wow this guru of AI and rationality is a dipshit. Makes me wonder about all those Silicon Valley folk and vc people that take him seriously. 🤔
No kidding. Anyone who thinks the hallmark of a good relationship is being able to determine the point at which they would dump their SO for someone “better” and somehow distill that down to a concrete (yet still highly subjective) number should just avoid relationships altogether. At least until they’ve consulted a proctologist about removing their head from their own ass.
You do realize this is satire though?
No, I know this dude’s deal, he is 100% for real (or trying to get a reaction, but that’s not satire on its own). His posts are often like this.
Wait what?! Not for one second did I think that this could be anything else than satire
Yudkowsky is well-known for his work in AI. He occasionally makes jokes, but it’s usually about AI (not relationships). I know that on his profile, it says something like “when I don’t use punctuation, it’s a joke,” akin to Reddit’s /s.
And yeah, he left off a period on the first post, though not the other two. But that said, he rarely makes multi-part jokes. It’s pretty clear to me, having read his posts and articles for a while, that he means this.
To further clarify that this is a “rationalist” of the highest order, consider that he wrote a half-a-million-plus word fanfic of Harry Potter, but with Harry studying science instead of magic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
I hate that I love that story, but HPMOR is actually genuinely really good.
No shame in that! It is actually pretty well-written, and it has some engaging points. I’m not “anti-rationalism” or anti-this-guy or anything like that. LessWrong did more for global altruism than I ever will.
I’m just pointing out that a person who has dedicated their entire public persona to an ideology (or lack of one) is probably not joking when they start evaluating romantic partners with supposedly objective percentages.
What a business degree does to a mf
I have taken business in college and graduated. I whole heartedly disagree with him.
Just saying.
Proud of you
I honestly enjoy seeing people like this with batshit insane but logically consistent views. Makes things much more fun
This guy essentially founded modern “rationalism.” He has millions of literal followers, not just the Twitter kind. His dumbass is the one that spawned the Effective Altruism cult that has become extremely popular with tech bros. Sam bankman-fried, Sam Altman, Elon musk all subscribe to this “philosophy.” It’s all batshit insane and incredibly stupid.
Hold on, he’s serious?
Yup. Satire no longer exists, welcome to 2024.
Yes, he basically has a cult dedicated to his whims. He’s pretty stupid
Damn, I thought he was shitposting, that’s sad.
When your ego is large enough to fantasize that a malevolent AI will create a simulation of yourself to torture for eternity simply because you didn’t spend all your money trying to bring it into being.
As an autistic dude, I feel like I know that it’s weird too say, but I also feel like it makes sense. Like it’s hard to quantify x% better, but I’m sure there is a number, for me at least, where if someone is that much better and would date me, I’d do it. It’s not romantic to say, but it’s true. And I’ve been dumped for other people twice so the same must have been true for them.
It just feels like one of the thousands of unspoken rules you’re not allowed to talk about out of politeness. But honestly I would like to know that number for my SO.
If you’re curious about an alternative view, I suggest The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. Relationships are about growing your own and the others natural abilities, something you do and not about trading something you have. The OP post is a materialistic view and a belief in inequality. YMMV.
He’s also the psycho who founded a movement which designed to let insane billionaires justify spending their money however they want, no matter the people they hurt now, as long as it’s ‘for the greater good’ long term.
The OOP needs to kiss the business end of a wood chipper if you ask me
sure. just codify the human experience of love, marriage, sex, relationships, family and their interpersonal connections and the entire population into a single integer in a way that the difference between 42 and 43, and 1 and 153, is meaningful to everyone regardless of race, culture, creed, ethnicity, language, class, location, age, upbringing, wants, needs, desires, hopes, dreams and in a way that remains meaningful for up to 8 decades as well as the first meeting of a relationship and encourages people to feel safe, confident and happy to leave a relationship based on a relative number to their assigned integer. It should keep you busy for a little while but I look forward to seeing what number you assign to, for eg a Liberian refugee in Sierra Leone or a Changar itinerant harvesting travelling village, or Prince Harry of England and when I see it I can say “ah, yes, an 81, of course.”
This is a weird attempt to put me down?? Obviously this is a personal number, I have no idea why you think I’m implying there is one formulas that fits every person in the world other than you just wanted to fight.
Ive no plan to meet second best nor be second best and I wouldn’t want to put someone through that nor go through it.
We live in a world of consumption and throw away culture, we should have more respect then to inflict these ideas on living breathing and feeling people.
Fuck that guy and his creed.
I seriously doubt that’s his creed.
It’s clearly meant as a parody of the way relationships end, but said out loud, in advance, to show the absurdity of exactly what you called out: “trading up” out of a relationship.
The whole point of his post, was to get people to realize how shitty it is to think of people that way.
No this guy is a guru and has influenced a lot of silicon valley with this type of “parody” look him up if you haven’t already.
Oof, fair enough. I just ran head first into Poe’s law. Thank you for the added context. Yeah, he’s a piece of shit then.
“Is this normal?”
No, it is not normal to state what percent-better-person you would leave your romantic partner for. It’s cynical and narcissistic.
What if your partner is in an accident that changes how they look or live? Now that they’re X% “less” than what you signed on for, you can just dip?
Like I get being upfront about stuff, but this is just transactional. It’s not about your commitment to another person, it’s about maximizing your return on investment.
You could have answered my question a bit earlier, I broke my nose this morning and now her divorce lawyer has informed me that my neighbor across the street has gone up to 12% better than me.
EDIT: I just went over and broke the guy’s kneecaps and am now happily married again.
Mozel tov, may your love enemy forever crawl on his belly
And wait till they start disagreeing on if that person is really “75%” better. I bet you this guy is single
This Eliezer Yudkowsky. He wrote a bunch of nerd fanfiction, and is apparently mostly famous for his takes on AI. He is a public figure.
Can you post some bikini pics of your wife? I think I’m at least 11% better than you.
I also choose this guy’s wife.
Now now. Let’s form an orderly queue here.
Not a circle? Or a blowbang?
It’s a reddit reference sir, but it checks out.
I’m pretty sure the ROI for relationships with people who quantify abstractions is in the negative.
They are. Which is why these people go for FWB…if they can even get that
Tell me you’re a 44 year old man with a Messiah complex who spends his Friday nights trolling college bars for girls his estranged daughter’s age without telling me.
I have had this easy with one simple trick: be naturally worse than literally any other person out there and you’ll never need to worry about someone trading up because they won’t take you to begin with!
Checkmate logic dude!
I’d like to actually discuss the problems I perceive with Yudkowsky‘s take for a moment, before everyone can go on with telling each other how crap his opinion is.
First, quantifying emotional states is hard, if not impossible at the moment. This could easily lead to misconceptions and misunderstandings, as it is not clear what x% “better” means. Second, people probably don’t always want to live in constant fear of getting dumped by their partners. I mean, I get it, if you are in a relationship where you would leave your partner for someone else it’s definitely not a bad idea to be clear about that, but I don’t think that is the norm at all in relationships “even” apart from marriage. So his tweet about marriages being an agreement to ignore other options is not wrong itself, but he seems to lack the understanding that many relationships outside of marriage include this social contract as well. Especially in a monogamous relationship, this view does not seem to make sense to me as it’s just a possibly emotionally hurtful way to tell your partner about your fear of commitment.
My problem with it is that the percentage changes day by day
Unhealthy fear of committment
Be glad she didn’t insist on -10%.
all you have to do then is lower your own ‘rating’ so far that finding someone ‘worse’ would be impossible.
