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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Romance, misunderstanding, social stances, and the human LLM, published by Kaj Sotala on April 27, 2023 on LessWrong.
1. Cross-sex friendships
I saw a tweet recently that was talking about one of the possible conditions where (heterosexual) men and women have an easy time being “just friends”:
if the “lovers” symbol energy is already bound up in something else, and/or if there is another archetypal relationship that holds more power and more draw for these two, both enough to actually crowd out the call of “lovers” equilibrium
I liked that, but it probably isn’t very clear to everyone. So let me try to explain how I understand it.
A friendship can bring up feelings of affection, closeness, vulnerability, and even sexual attraction. Many people might associate those primarily with a romantic relationship. If the feelings and the association are strong enough and other necessary conditions are in place, the people may feel drawn toward the "shape" of that association.
In “Goodhart’s Law inside the human mind”, I talked about how automatic pattern completion is a pervasive aspect of human thought. If your balance is slightly off, it feels wrong, and (assuming that you are a healthy able-bodied adult) you are automatically drawn into a posture that feels more right. Or if you have learned a skill slightly wrong and have to unlearn bits of it, it's going to be difficult at first, because the "right" way of doing it feels wrong. Until you relearn what the "right" shape is, you will be automatically drawn back into your old pattern.
There's a model that developing expertise in something is all about learning to perceive things as having particular kinds of shapes, that your mind/body can then automatically fill in.
Learning to walk involves developing a sense of it's like to maintain balance while being upright and moving forward. Eventually, your body comes to automatically carry out the right pattern for maintaining that feeling and correcting deviations from it.
Learning to be polite in conversation involves developing a sense of what it's like to be polite to someone. Eventually, your mind comes to automatically carry out the right pattern for maintaining that feeling and correcting deviations from it.
Learning to solve systems of algebraic equations involves developing a sense of what it's like to carry out the right steps to solve them. Eventually, your mind comes to automatically carry out the right pattern for maintaining that feeling and correcting deviations from it.
Likewise, if someone has a stored pattern saying that a romantic relationship involves affection, closeness, and vulnerability... and all of those are present in a particular friendship, then it may feel wrong for the sexual attraction to be missing. Like a pattern that's subtly deviating from what it should be, with there being an automatic impulse towards correcting it by adding a sexual component.
There's an observation that many men don't get to experience emotional vulnerability with their male friends. Instead, they associate it as something that can only happen with a woman they are romantically involved with.
A female friend of mine once had to politely tell a male friend of hers that she wasn't romantically interested in him. "But why have you spent all this time hanging out with me and having these deep conversations with me, then?", was his response. "Uhh, because we're friends?", was hers.
It was like the pattern of "an emotionally deep friendship with a woman without sex and romance" wasn't available for him, so anything that was creating emotional depth felt like it was obviously moving towards the "romantic relationship" pattern.
Also, you can even have sexual attraction in an otherwise Platonic relationship. People might flirt with each other without ever intending or having an interes...
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