meta

alternative titles:

• values and disvalues in people
• red flags and green flags

originally wrote this in 2022/3, paused for a while, made some substantive edits in 24.

originally wrote this thinking of the person whose husband i’d like to become, hence the occasional use of female pronouns.

green

• agentic
  • do things
  • a very strong attitude of “getting it done now”
  • i could — and probably will — write a full essay on agency. for now, i’ll just list some examples and assume you get the vibe.
  • ex:
    • h/t alexey guzey:
      • delivered a ton of interesting projects that weren’t helpful for anything in particular (whether it’s writing, coding, leading or anything else)
      • have a history of embarrassing cold emails
    • she’s able to Get The Ball Rolling
    • she makes sure someone is on-point for every, single, goddamn thing
    • she’s able to effectively select options from a wide space, without consistently going to the default path
  • good parenting is being deeply agentic toward your child
    • heroic responsiblity is constantly at play — what, your excuse is that it’s the baby’s fault? it’s always going to be on you, at the end of the day.
    • you’re constantly selecting from a super wide option space, often without any clear default path
      • or the default path is just clearly bad parenting (cf ipad kids), and you decide not to take it
  • people who embody this most, in no order:
    • misha gerovitch, wrena sproat, austin chen, juan gil, joseph pendleton, oli habryka, jacob lagerros, rachel weinberg, ricki heicklen, william kuchenbuch
    • casey shea dinkin
  • links:
• caring [maybe conviction?]
  • values things
  • cares deeply about that which she values and disvalues
    • visceral, intense, core, deep
  • people who embody this most, in no order:
    • wrena sproat, misha gerovitch, austin chen, tom shlomi, oli habryka,
    • ~most EAs i know
    • casey shea dinkin
    • my parents, about their children
    • my sister
• act on beliefs & values [fix tense issues in wording; maybe “sincerity”] // acts according to that which she cares about
  • sincerity, a la jcarlsmith
  • is willing to make significant personal sacrifices for things she actually values, act in alignment with her values
    • ex: go vegan, drop out of undergrad, donate 10% of her income, work for [insert your choice of traditionally distasteful political coalition], acting illegally with a high chance of getting caught, quitting a job, cutting off a friend [^note: i don’t necessarily think these are good ideas. in fact, most of the time, for most people, most of these aren’t. i don’t endorse making significant personal sacrifices on a whim; i do endorse thinking really, really hard about your values, then caring deeply and making significant sacrifices for things about which you care deeply.]
    • not doing this is often a form of self-deception
    • meta ex: do you think that i am a deceptive person? do you think i’m agentic or caring? do you think i act in alignment with my values? how are you behaving in light of your answer?
  • there’s a sorta mental trick where someone realizes something intellectually, then doesn’t change their behavior at all
    • this is surprisingly easy to spot, if you’re looking out for it — people do this constantly
    • socrates: “It is better to change an opinion than to persist in the wrong one.”
    • saul: “It is better to change an opinion than to persist in the wrong one. But that’s just the first step: once your opinion is changed, it is better to change your actions accordingly than to persist in the wrong ones.”
  • people who embody this most, in no order:
    • austin chen, david rapperport, wrena sproat, misha gerovitch, juan gil, oli habryka
    • ~many EAs i know
    • joseph pendleton
• chill
  • this is really hard to pin down, it’s much more of a vibe
  • sorta like the opposite of annoying?
  • questions to pin down if someone’s chill:
    • do you feel yourself relax in their presence? alternatively, do you often feel on-edge, restless, or uptight around them?
    • do you feel more comfortable around yourself when you’re with them? do you feel chill when you’re with them?
    • does conversation with them feel like a breeze? like you’re barely trying, and you don’t need to be trying? or are you constantly trying to ensure that good outcomes happen, planning out the tree diagrams of human interaction? [LINK TO DYNOMIGHT “TIPS ON INTERACTING WITH HUMANS” OR WHATEVER THE FUCK IT IS”]
  • this might be thought of as “high baked-in social calibration”
  • (personal note: i’m not a very chill person. this is something i’m working on, and if you have good advice [LINK], let me know!)
  • low neuroticism
  • people who embody this most, in no order:
    • chris sims, aaron zhang
    • max schumaker
    • rafe

red

• deceptive
  • toward random people
    • ex: homeless person asks her for money, she says “i don’t carry cash” when she in fact does — instead of saying “no :(”
  • toward people she cares about (e.g. parents, siblings, friends)
    • ex: telling a friend that they can’t hang out because they have class/doctor’s appt/etc, when in fact they’re just tired and want to take a nap
    • ex: when their parents ask if they’ve studied for a final/done some other nonfalsifiable thing, they say “yup” when they haven’t, in fact, done that thing
    • ex: blame strict parents for not going out with friends, when in fact they don’t have strict parents
  • toward themself
    • ex: “i’m not too worried about that final. it’s fine. it’s whatever.”
    • ex: ignores thoughts you can’t think, see e.g. nate soares on “‘should’ considered harmful” [LINK]
      • “If you find yourself unable to think about a certain outcome, it can be very useful to think all the way through the painful outcome — not to convince yourself that everything would actually be fine, but just so that you can actually think about it. It's the thoughts you can't think that really screw you.”
  • most importantly, toward me
    • this is (obviously) the hardest to detect, so i normally try to use deceptiveness toward others as a proxy for how deceptive they’re likely to be toward me
    • there are still a number of tiny, tiny ways in which people can be deceptive to you without even realizing they’re being deceptive.
    • exs:
      • i ask if they’re listening, they say “yup” and keep looking at their phone/computer
      • they don’t telegraph their moves [LINK] — e.g. when they’re running late, they don’t let me know
    • the above examples are tiny. agreed. also, they’re instances of people being mildly annoying. agreed.
      • but they aren’t just instances of people being annoying — they’re also being deceptive. even though it’s a tiny, miniscule form of deception that they probably wouldn’t even think about, that barely anyone gives two shits about, it’s been sufficiently predictive of a general pattern of deception for me in the past that i’m willing to act on it.
  • [update from my previous thinking, written jan25]
• obvious ones

scratchpad

• green
• red

notes

• the properties of the things i was look to find, ordered by importance:
• i tried to roughly categorize green flags as supererogatory, and red flags as [supererogatory but for bad things, where you’re probably not morally forbidden, but it’s still bad]
• many of these use the example of a woman, because i was originally thinking about this in terms of dating, and i happen to be a straight man
• this was mostly descriptive, not normative — i’m not (necessarily) sure that these are the way that things ought to be, but i’ve noticed that i really, really hate when people are deceptive, and really, really love when people are agentic, and really care, etc.
• they’re meant as signals, proxies, indicators, etc — many people whom i love entirely miss one or more of them
• some of these often trade off against each other! e.g. becoming marginally more chill will probably mean, in some cases, acting on fewer of your beliefs & values
• value-change — extremely important, write more about this