The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me.
This seems quite false, at least with the currencies of time and attention. When given or spent on another, you no longer have them.
The English idioms of "paying attention" and "giving attention" are misleading. One is not paying or giving these as things to the other person, as a consideration for which they will pay or give some quantity of theirs to you. Instead, both are jointly using their time and attention to create something to their common benefit.
I can imagine people treating their paying of attention in that transactional way, an hour for an hour, a pat on the back for a pat on the back, but it strikes me as dysfunctional.
Yet when you've spent an hour with someone and they've spent an hour with you, that hour is gone and you no longer have it contra your comment above. I would call that "having spent it".
You would be in the same situation if you'd done something else during that hour. You're only "paying", in the sense of giving up something valuable to you, in so far as you would have preferred to do something else.
That's sometimes true of time spent with friends -- maybe your friend is moving house and you help them unload a lot of boxes or something -- but by and large we human beings tend to enjoy spending time with our friends. (Even when unloading boxes, actually.)
You're only "paying", in the sense of giving up something valuable to you, in so far as you would have preferred to do something else.
I don't think that makes sense. When I spend dollars from my bank balance on the things I most prefer to spend them on, I haven't not spent them just because that's the thing I most wanted to buy. I don't think it's any different with time. The spending is in that's in gone and I no longer have it, no matter how pleased or displeased I am with how the resource was consumed.
I am not convinced by the analogy. If you have $30 in your bank account you spend it on a book, you are $30 poorer; you had the option of just not doing that, in which case you would still have the $30. If you have 60 minutes ahead of you in the day and you spend it with a friend, then indeed you're 60 minutes older = poorer at the end of that time; but you didn't have the option of not spending those 60 minutes; they were going to pass by one way or another whatever you did.
You might still have given up something valuable! If you'd have preferred to devote those 60 minutes to earning money, or sleeping, or discovering timeless mathematical truths, then talking to your friend instead has had an opportunity cost. But the valuable thing you've foregone is that other thing you'd prefer to have done, not the time itself. That was always going to pass you by; it always does.
There aren't exactly definite right and wrong answers here; everyone agrees that "spending" time is not exactly the same thing as spending money, ditto for "giving" time, and the question is merely whether it's similar enough that the choice of language isn't misleading us. And it seems to me that, because the time is going to go anyway, the least-misleading way to think of it is that the default, no-action, case to compare with -- analogous to simply not spending money and having it sit in the bank -- is whatever you'd have been doing with your time otherwise. If you help a friend out by doing some tedious task that makes their life better, then you are "giving" or "spending" time. If you sit and chat with a friend because you both enjoy talking with one another, then you're not "giving" or "spending" in a sense that much resembles "giving" or "spending" money: you aren't worse off afterwards than if you hadn't done that; if you hadn't, then you'd likely have occupied the same time doing something no better.
I'm in two minds as to whether I believe what I just wrote. The counter-argument goes like this: comparing the situation after spending an hour with your friend with the situation after spending an hour doing something else begs the question; it's like comparing the situation after spending the $30 on a book with that after spending the $30 on something else. But I don't think the counter-argument really works, precisely because you have the option of just leaving the $30 in the bank and never spending it on something else, and there is no corresponding option for money.
In the world where people had exactly $30 to spend every hour and they’d either spend it or it disappeared, would you object to calling that spending money? I feel like many of my spending intuitions would still basically transfer to that world.
In such a world we'd presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation :-). But yes, I would feel fine using the term "spending" (but then I also feel fine talking about "spending time") but wouldn't want to assume that all my intuitions from the present world still apply.
(E.g., in the actual world, for anyone who is neither very rich or very poor spending always has saving as an alternative[1], and how much you save can have a big impact on your future well-being. In the hypothetical spend-it-or-lose-it world, that isn't the case, and that feels like a pretty important difference.)
[1] For the very poor, much of their spending is basically compulsory and saving instead isn't an option. For the very rich, the choice is still there but for normal-size purchases matters less because they're going to have ample resources whether they spend or save.
In such a world we'd presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation
Opportunity cost? Spending the money on something prevents you from being able to spend it on anything else, and this fact remains true regardless for whether it "spoils" after an hour or not.
This entire dialogue reads like you and Raemon aren't disagreeing much on what you expect the world to be like (on the object-level) but you instead have a definitional dispute about whether you are "paying" or "spending" something when you have to deal with a substantial opportunity cost, with Raemon taking the "yes" stance (which agrees with standard economic thinking that thinks of economic profit as accounting profit minus opportunity cost) and you taking the "no" position (which seems more in line with regular, non-economic-jargon language).
This is perhaps due to the fact that the two of you have cached thoughts associated with the label of "spending" more so than with the substance of it.
1Right: as I said upthread, the discussion is largely about whether terms like "spending" are misleading or helpful when we're talking about time rather than money. And, as you point out (or at least it seems clearly implied by what you say), whether a given term is helpful to a given person will depend on what other things are associated with that term in that person's mind, so it's not like there's even a definite answer to "is it helpful or misleading?".
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
Oh yeah, oops. I saw Raemon made the (at-the-time) most recent comment and that someone whose name also started with R was commenting upthread, so I pattern-matched incorrectly.
In addition to what you have said here, you cannot save up your time. It's questionable if you can save up your pats on the back (which you might just as well give away very liberally, and your reward could be as simple as the meaning or help it created for someone else). Perhaps you can save your attention, but usually that is going to be between you and your work and internet/media habits more than human interaction habits.
There could be some extreme cases where someone is hogging an undue level of time and attention (and at that point, you need to set boundaries as the issue likely lies within you as much as your friend). Which segues into, I think the whole point OP is missing, "It takes two to tango." There's something complex in the interaction between two people. If it was "worthwhile" or "you got something out of it" it is often due to the influence of your own actions, words, reality field as much as anything they willfully "did" or "did not do." And if it seemed like a waste of time, well, at least 50% of that interaction was you!
Your statement "The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me." is correct. To reach a little further into it, likely looking at things transactionally will skew human interactions in a specific direction, self-selecting for other people and interactions of a certain type. Strangely, for the person who believes in transactional human interactions, I suspect due to that skewing, looking back it will appear that their perspective was "correct." Transactionalism being a kind of self-reinforcing or even self-feeding pattern.
I think this might be akin to the conversational results that would be achieved in social interactions between a habit of steelmanning vs strawmanning. In steelmanning, you would understand things better, but also in my experience you can draw out the best of the other person's thinking, intentions, etc. The entire interaction typically changes. Especially if you are talking to someone from an otherwise embattled group. Often they drop the whole thing after awhile and you're talking to another human with about the same needs, wants, and motives as any other decent person, and there's something to connect to.
As you said, paying of attention and pats on the back in a transactional way seems dysfunctional. But it's also selective for partners who themselves are either very transactive or very giving. It's likely someone could leave ten years of doing it that way thinking they were "right." And if all you care about is one level of tangible results, it might be "an effective strategy." It's only a partial analogy, but just like the ideologue who goes around looking for every hole and inconsistency in dissenting views (the highbrow version of strawmanning) will have been "right" about all those idiots out there.
One is not paying or giving these as things to the other person, as a consideration for which they will pay or give some quantity of theirs to you.
This fails to take into account the straightforward concept of opportunity cost, which sits at the core of basic economic thinking about these matters.
Yes, you are not literally paying in money or blood to spend time with someone else (at least not in most cases), but doing the latter does impose an opportunity cost because it prevents you from doing other things during that timeframe, things that could have been productive or given you some other benefit. It does not matter if this engagement is transactional or mutualistic or heartfelt, the opportunity cost exists nonetheless.
Spending time with friends has an opportunity cost, regardless of whether the activity you engage in is pleasurable or hurtful or whether it generates consideration or not.
I entirely agree, and it also seems false due to Dunbar's number-related considerations. While it's not an actual, physical hard cap on the number of friends you have, simply making a new non-surface-level friendship probably makes it more difficult and cognitively demanding (on the margin) to maintain stable relationships with your other friends (past a certain point, at least).
Right, but that seems to imply you had to give up spending the time and attention elsewhere. There are definitely times where spending time with a certain person is pretty close to a terminal goal. And in that case "spending" seems to be a bit of a misleading word.
Right, but that seems to imply you had to give up spending the time and attention elsewhere.
But you did? That's how spending your time works.
I think using up a resource such that it can't be used elsewhere (most usually $$ or time) counts as spending that resource regardless of whether you're using it up for something instrumental or terminal. I'm also happy with consuming, though "spending" is more usually the English word for consuming a consumable resource for some purpose.
Start of post:
Friendship is transactional [...] we befriend people because we get something out of it
End of post:
I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it [...] My claim here is that forming unconditional attachments as a behavior makes sense for insurance-like game theoretic reasons, and that explains why us humans are so into them.
I think these statements have two different meanings. The first is about looking at the individual alone, and seeing "what internal causes lead to what behaviors?" The second is about looking at the individual in the context of the history of the universe, and asking "what caused those internal causes? (an evolutionary process)"
It's the same difference between "pursuing one's values because it's what they care about", and "caring about it in the first place because long ago evolution selected for a certain space of minds". E.g., it would be false to say that I only care about others so I can survive, even though caring-for-others was the surviving policy.
That said, I do think it could also be true that normal humans subtly expect friendships to be transactional, in a way that's really reducible to some internal cause in them, that they're not aware of by default. Parts of your post are about this instead, and I think those parts are valid, to the extent normal-humans are really like that.
But as for myself.. I don't think about my friendships that way, and if I introspect I see things like 'mutual fun seeking', which by your account is transactional, but.. it doesn't feel like this: "I'm doing this just so I have fun. Them having fun too is just a side effect, and they feel the same about me." We actually care about each other intrinsically.[1]
I agree that evolution probably embedded some 'shards of personal-gain-seeking' in our psychology around friendships, but if so I don't endorse that, and I wouldn't choose to embrace that aspect of reality and conclude 'friendship and love are fundamentally about transaction': I'd treat it as just another bias to try to avoid. A hypothetical version of me in a future utopia would read this post, reason through the above, and then conclude: "But I don't want to be like that, and my ideal world isn't like this, so I'm going to change my psychology."
- ^
If 'caring about each other' is also labelled as self-interested, then I would say that your argument is secretly the philosophical position of psychological egoism, being applied to the particular case of friendships.
Philosopher Dan Williams[1]'s recent post titled "Socialism, self-deception, and spontaneous order" contains some relevant commentary[2]:
Humans are intensely cooperative. Why? What motivates individuals to help and assist others? Why are people often so friendly, generous, and fair-minded?
Genuine altruism plays an important role among close family members. For well-known evolutionary reasons, organisms can propagate their genes by helping relatives who share copies of those genes. This is why the most intense cooperation typically occurs among relatives, and extended kinship networks are such a common form of social organisation.
However, most human cooperation is not altruistic; it is mutualistic. Outside the family, people cooperate for mutual benefit—to achieve fitness-relevant goals they could not achieve independently.
For example, we cooperate for reasons of interdependence. In many contexts, we depend on—that is, have a self-interested stake in the survival and success of—others, so we benefit ourselves by helping them. Although the concept of interdependence makes many people feel warm and fuzzy, it has a harsh logic: if we do not depend on others—e.g., because they are a rival, outsider, or burden—motives to help them often disappear.
We also cooperate so that others might return the favour. This includes long-term reciprocal relationships between spouses and friends, as well as community-wide (“indirect”) reciprocity whereby people aid others so that someone (not necessarily the specific person they helped) will return the favour. Such community-wide cooperation is typically scaffolded by social norms and gossip, which emerge because people personally benefit from designing, enforcing, and conforming to norms and from spreading and consuming juicy tittle-tattle about people’s behaviours and misdeeds.
Relatedly, we cooperate to improve our reputations and win esteem. People benefit from being seen as virtuous, norm-abiding community members. A good reputation is socially rewarded, protects people against collective punishment, and makes them more attractive mates, friends, and allies. Given this, self-sacrifice, benevolence, and generosity are often reputationally lucrative, which explains why—paradoxically—people sometimes compete to be more cooperative than others.
A striking feature of research on the evolution of human cooperation is that the explanations it identifies—for example, mutual benefit, interdependence, reciprocity, reputation, and prestige—often bear little resemblance to people’s own understanding of their cooperative behaviour.
I am not making the trivial point that people are oblivious to the evolutionary reasons for their actions. Even if people’s prosocial instincts are ultimately rooted in the fitness benefits of cooperation, such Darwinian rationales are always distinct from people’s proximate motives. For example, people typically have sex not to reproduce but because sex feels good, even though the Darwinian reason sex feels good is to encourage reproduction. Likewise, people care for their children not to propagate their genes but because they love their children, even though the Darwinian reason for parental love is that it helps people propagate their genes.
Mutualistic cooperation is different: it is not just the Darwinian rationale for cooperation that clashes with our self-understanding but the proximate motives driving our behaviour. Because mutualistic cooperation functions to promote individual self-interest, people are generally motivated to cooperate only when doing so is personally advantageous. That is, unlike sex or the well-being of their children, people do not place a non-instrumental value on mutualistic cooperation; it must be incentivised.
[...]
Nevertheless, when people describe their cooperative behaviour, they almost never acknowledge this situation. They depict self-interest as irrelevant to their friendliness, fair-mindedness, and generosity. The help others because others need help, because they care about the “common good”, because it is “the right thing to do”, and so on. They value cooperation not because it constitutes a personally advantageous strategy; they value it as an end in itself.
Once again, the point is not that this self-conception is a lie. People sincerely—indeed, passionately—believe such stories. Moreover, we have evolved to cultivate prosocial traits and dispositions that make such stories plausible. Because it is costly to appear like calculating and selective cooperators, we often cultivate robust prosocial instincts designed to appear uncalculating and unselective. Nevertheless, just like press secretaries are highly skilled at painting their client’s behaviour in the most attractive light, the stories we tell—and believe—about our motives for cooperation are designed not for accuracy but to paint our behaviour in ways that make us look good.
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I don't think "self-deception" is a satisfying answer to why this happens, as if to claim that you just need to realize that you're secretly causal decision theory inside. It seems to me that this does demonstrate a mismatch, and failing to notice the mismatch is an error, but people who want that better world need not give up on it just because there's a mismatch. I even agree that things are often optimized to make people look good. But I don't think it's correct to jump to "and therefore, people cannot objectively care about each other in ways that are not advantageous to their own personal fitness". I think there's a failure of communication, where the perspective he criticizes is broken according to its own values, and part of how it's broken involves self-deception, but saying that and calling it a day misses most of the interesting patterns in why someone who wants a better world feels drawn to the ideas involved and feels the current organizational designs are importantly broken.
I feel similarly about OP. Like, agree maybe it's insurance - but, are you sure we're using the decision theory we want to be here?
another quote from the article you linked:
To be clear, the point is not that people are Machiavellian psychopaths underneath the confabulations and self-narratives they develop. Humans have prosocial instincts, empathy, and an intuitive sense of fairness. The point is rather that these likeable features are inevitably limited, and self-serving motives—for prestige, power, and resources—often play a bigger role in our behaviour than we are eager to admit.
...or approve of? this seems more like a failure to implement ones' own values! I feel more like the "real me" is the one who Actually Cooperates Because I Care, and the present day me who fails at that does so because of failing to be sufficiently self-and-other-interpretable to be able to demand I do it reliably (but like, this is from a sort of FDT-ish perspective, where when we consider changing this, we're considering changing all people who would have a similar-to-me thought about this at once to be slightly less discooperative-in-fact). Getting to a point where we can have a better OSGT moral equilibrium (in the world where things weren't about to go really crazy from AI) would have to be an incremental deescalation of inner vs outer behavior mismatch, but I feel like we ought to be able to move that way in principle, and it seems to me that I endorse the side of this mismatch that this article calls self-deceptive. Yeah, it's hard to care about everyone, and when the only thing that gives heavy training pressure to do so is an adversarial evaluation game, it's pretty easy to be misaligned. But I think that's bad actually, and smoothly, non-abruptly moving to an evaluation environment where matching internal vs external is possible seems like in the non-AI world it would sure be pretty nice!
(edit: at very least in the humans-only scenario, I claim much of the hard part of that is doing this more-transparency-and-prosociality-demanding-environemnt in a way that doesn't cause a bunch of negative spurious demands, and/or/via just moving the discooperativeness to the choice of what demands become popular. I claim that people currently taking issue with attempts at using increased pressure to create this equilibrium are often noticing ways the more-prosociality-demanding-memes didn't sufficiently self-reflect to avoid making what are actually in some way just bad demands by more-prosocial-memes' own standards.)
maybe even in the AI world; it just like, might take a lot longer to do this for humans than we have time for. but maybe it's needed to solve the problem, idk. getting into the more speculative parts of the point I wanna make here.
Other possible frames for this phenomenon:
- I stand by friends, even when the transaction portion is no longer beneficial, because that is a virtuous thing to do.
- I love/befriend unconditionally because that's what people who I admire (mostly fictional, honestly, but still...) do.
- I remain friends with (some) people who no longer help me, because it increases my status with others.
All of these kind of fit your insurance/game-theory model, but they feel very different from inside.
Yeah, those seem like compatible-with-my-post things to go on inside a person's head. Compatible in the sense that those all still need further explanation for "why is it regarded as virtuous"/"why do people you admire do it"/"why does it increase status?" and the game theory is the answer to that.
Note that I don't think this dynamic needs to be very conscious on anyone's part. I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it, even if the human executing just feels a wordless pull to that kind of behavior.
Yup, exactly. It makes me think back to The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. It's been a while since I read it so take what follows with a grain of salt, because I could be butchering some stuff, but that book makes the argument that this sort of thing goes beyond friendship and into all types of emotions and moral feelings.
Like if you're at the grocery store and someone just cuts you in line for no reason, one way of looking at it is that the cost to you is negligible -- you just need to wait an additional 45 seconds for them to check out -- and so the rational thing would be to just let it happen. You could confront them, but what exactly would you have to gain? Suppose you are traveling and will never see any of the people in the area ever again.
But we have evolved such that this situation would evoke some strong emotions regarding unfairness, and these emotions would often drive you to confront the person who cut you in line. I forget if this stuff is more at the individual level or the cultural level.
I don't think human behaviour and relationships are reducible to economics like that.
It seems like you're pretty much starting from the axiom that economic calculus has to be at the bottom of everything, and any behaviour that isn't explicitly game theory has to be an abstraction/higher level implementation of it.
That's just not how people work.
Evolution didn't happen bottom up from an economics textbook. Behaviour that results in "winning" outcomes gets propagated. You can examine those from the perspective of economic theory, but economic theory isn't the origin.
There doesn't need to be a hidden "econ 101" subroutine that obfuscates itself.
The much simpler explanation is that unconditional relationships have been adaptive and beneficial, if not for the individual then for the group, just as being deceptive about ones commitment to others can be a competitive advantage.
Something tells me that the selective pressure to keep "the tribe" alive has been a much more fundamental factor for the evolution of human social behaviour than the pressure to attain a resource advantage over our peers.
Therefore, I think genuinely "unconditional" relationships existing is the much more likely explanation.
("Unconditional" with the exception of the other side defecting in substantial ways. These relationships can be broken, but only if the underlying belief gets falsified).
It feels a little icky to say, but we befriend people because we get something out of it. We enjoy the company, the conversation, the emotional support, the activities, the connection, etc. It's not a coincidence people don't befriend brick walls.
(The same is true in romantic relationships, except we expect even more.)
Granted, friendship is not an explicit transaction that's negotiated, quantified, legally enforceable, etc. It's fuzzy, which helps it work better for reasons I won't really get into here[1].
However it's crucial to recognize that if your friend (or partner) didn't provide or promise you some kind of value[2], you wouldn't have become friends in the first place.
And yet, people valorize the notion of loyalty in relationships: continuing to be there through thick and thin, good and bad, health and illness. "Unconditional friendship" and "unconditional love". Conversely "fair weather friendship" is denigrated.
People hope to be loved even if they were worms.
What gives? How do we reconcile friendships and relationships arising due to receiving some value with the aspiration or even expectation of unconditionality?
My model here is something akin functionally to mutual insurance. While I became your friend because we spent years playing basketball together, I stay by your side even when you're recovering from a broken leg, or even if you were injured so badly as to never play again. Someone initially enticed by their partner's beauty, stays with them even after a horrific burn to the face. I do this because I expect the same in return.
You might argue that in these cases, you're still receiving other benefits even when one of them is lost, but I argue back that we see ongoing care even where there's almost nothing left, e.g. people caring for their senile, bedridden partners. And more so, that we judge people who don't stick it out.
Friendship is standardly a straightforward exchange of value provided. It is also an exchange of insurance "if you're not able to provide value to me, I'll still provide value to you" and vice versa. Like the other stuff in friendship, it's fuzzy. The insurance exchange doesn't happen in a discrete moment and its strength is quantitative and expected to grow over time. People expect more "loyalty" from friends and partners of years than weeks.
In the limit, people reach "unconditional love", meaning something like from this point on, I will love you no matter what. However, reaching that willingness was very probably tied to specific conditional factors. It's notable that for many people love and security are connected. Sufficiently loving and supportive relationships provide security because they imply an unconditionality on circumstances – you'll have someone even if fortune befalls you and you lose what makes you appealing in the first place.
I think this makes sense. Seems like good game theoretic trade even with a willing partner. "Till death do us part." Possibly worth making a little more explicit though, just to be sure your friends and partners share whatever expectations of loyalty you have.
Note that I don't think this dynamic needs to be very conscious on anyone's part. I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it, even if the human executing just feels a wordless pull to that kind of behavior. In this context, "attachment to others" feels like a thing that humans and other animals experience. Parents, perhaps especially mothers, are very attached to their children (think of the mother bear), but we tend to form attachments to anyone (or thing) that we're persistently around. When I stick with my friend of many years through his illness, it might feel like, or actually be mediated, by my feelings of attachment.
My claim here is that forming unconditional attachments as a behavior makes sense for insurance-like game theoretic reasons, and that explains why us humans are so into them.
Here's wishing everyone lots of both strong relationships that'd pay out handsomely and also that they never need file a claim. ;)
One major reason is doing more precise accounting in relationships would be prohibitively effortful. Another is that such accounting is antithetical to the spirit of generosity and altruism we aim for in non-professional relationships. The vibe of counting value exchange precisely pushes against the vibe of unconditional, or less conditional, caring that we want friendship to tend towards. Lastly, I think there is something of a "polite pretending" that relationships aren't transcantional, since that makes them feel more secure, allows room for useful plausible deniability, and other fancy social games.
The kinds of value provided by relationships are very diverse. Naturally you've got engaging in shared interests, emotional support, physical support, collaboration, physical intimacy; but there are also less overt forms of value gained from relationships like having a sense of being a good person because I take care of you, even though ostensibly I'm giving, or valuing the association with a person, or even misplaced feelings of security from the ongoing presence of an abusive partner.