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AdeleneDawner comments on New Post version 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name beings with l–z) - Less Wrong
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Comments (185)
Buh?
(This comment appears to fail to bridge any nontrivial inferential distances.)
Okay, I shall give an overly melodramatic personal answer, and perhaps it will reflect the preferences of others and perhaps not. But my real answer is really quite specific, I think, even if I would have other reasons if this one didn't dominate:
There is a certain type of perfection that is hinted at by some of my closed-eye visuals, for example when my mind is altered, that is more of a feeling than anything. The image that is most central to this feeling is a brief image of a modern apartment, elegantly furnished, smallish but not cramped, over 30 stories above ground level overlooking a nice part of some big city. It's night time, and the apartment is in shadows, and no one is home.
But I can feel that there's a couple that lives there, and I feel the subtle elegance of that kind of life. It's like... they're young, rich, well-dressed but not showy, well-cultured but not show-offs. They're at peace, especially with each other, though they spend most of their time apart. They radiate a certain gentleness and a certain elegance, but it's subtle and you'd only really be able to tell if you looked, but if you looked it'd be obvious. They have a single luxury car, an expensive guitar, an expensive DSLR, expensive furniture and a refrigerator filled with quality food, but they don't have many possessions nor any real responsibilities. They vacation often. Neither has many friends, and their friends don't much overlap, but the friends they have are close, and varied in skills and interests. A photographer, a mathematician, a monk, a business executive; though by no means are their friends one-dimensional. The couple lead a life that could scarcely be simpler, and yet with so many hints of richness, a certain kind of complexity that springs from the recursion of mutual understanding that is only tractable when everything is elegant. But really those are all just details that are filled in by the emotional tone of the image of that apartment, masked in shadows with nobody home.
It's really a lot less melodramatic than I'm making it sound, but... I know a girl who I can easily delude myself into thinking could have lived a life like that with a counterfactual version of me who didn't have to keep the stars from burning down---didn't have to save her. But that is samsara.
I'm a very aesthetically oriented person, and a happily married one, but this conflation of aesthetics with the happiness of a relationship feels very strange to me. Have you tried making things suit you aesthetically and found that it really makes you happy, or is this all theory?
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Eliot:
and of course
This comment actually succeeds in conveying ideas.
Eenh.
It could well be that I'm still missing something, but that sounds like it fails on at least number 2 of Eliezer's laws of fun.
We've reached the point in the conversation where I go "okay" and politely depart rather than telling someone what they should or shouldn't want, though.
It's very possible that I (naively introspectively) value "fun" a lot less than others do. As a human, I care a lot more about (the aesthetics of) perfection, probably because I'm so disturbed that so few others seem to care about it like I do and thus see "caring about (the aesthetics of) perfection" as my comparative advantage. As a transhuman or a Buddha, /shrugs.
I share this entire sentiment and feeling :( I hold out for the hope that i wont always share this feeling.
I read about a rather large number of dystopias, weirdtopias with strongly dystopic aspects, and cultures with awful practices, and never before have I wanted to run away from a lifestyle this badly. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
In the sense that it is very difficult to understand or that everything it says is obvious or some combination of the two?
More the former, though I don't think that it's difficult-to-understand in the usual sense - my impression is that it's distinctly more subjective than that.
I understand that some people find monogamy aesthetically pleasing, and can write that off as personal preference and ignore it in general. You seemed to be trying to give a better model than that, but none of your examples really hit the mark, there. (Is the bit about cheating supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?) I'm actually somewhat inclined to argue the 'noticing details' point, even - that's mostly a matter of having the opportunity to observe a person in a variety of situations, in my experience, and it seems to me that adding an extra spouse or two would help with that, not hinder it.