Context: an effort to think through and document some of what my girlfriend Lauren means to me, in roughly the style of my usual posts.

The scope of this post will obviously have to be limited. I’ve known Lauren since 2011, she is an immensely important person in my life, there are many things to talk about and I can’t cover them all here. The topics that I do cover will not necessarily be the most important or the most sentimental. Readers who are not Lauren should not expect to come away from this post with a comprehensive picture of either Lauren or the Lauren/James relationship. Readers who are Lauren should not expect to come away from this post with maximum sweetness. Instead, I’ll be focusing on the topics that seem the most fruitful for generating interesting insights.

Literature Review: Respect/Comfort

I’ll start by revisiting an example of the kind of analysis I hope to perform in this post. In a previous effort to distill something I particularly value in my relationship with Lauren, I made the following claim:

Consider a scatterplot of people, where the X axis is how much I respect them and the Y axis is how comfortable I feel around them. Lauren is an outlier to the upper right.

This claim was pretty off-the-cuff, but it has some ring of truth to it – I think it does capture something substantial about what I value in my relationship with Lauren. Consider the following visualization:

Ave Squeebis, morituri te salutant

As a first approximation, this is not a bad summary of the situation. Sorry plebs. But it’s not quite right, and I think I know how to do better.

Expanding on Respect/Comfort

The most obvious lead is that the shape of the pleb distribution is wrong. There exist people besides Lauren I respect very highly – but I’m generally not very personally comfortable with them. And there exist people besides Lauren that I’m quite comfortable with, but they generally don’t score as high on intellectual respect. And when I phrase it in trade-off language like that, the obvious formulation of the claim is in terms of a Pareto frontier instead of in terms of an outlier. Consider the following new and improved visualization:

You know what? Fuck it. To scale.

Now that’s more like it. Of course there exist extremes to one end or the other, such as an inscrutable superintelligence or a literal rock. But nobody is even close to Lauren in terms of having both respect and comfort.

But what exactly is my claim here? That Lauren is on the Pareto frontier? So is a rock! Surely there’s something stronger I can say.

Maybe Lauren Pareto dominates the greatest number of people? That’s not quite right: the bottom left of this plot is crammed with untold billions of plebs, and the claim I want to make doesn’t seem like it should depend on the details of how they’re distributed in there relative to Omega and the rock.

Maybe Lauren has the highest respect+comfort score? As illustrated that’s certainly true, but that would require some numerical conversion factor between units and respect and units of comfort. And for every point on the Pareto frontier, there exists some ratio for which that point scores the highest – in fact, that’s what it means to be on the Pareto frontier1! And if we just try to pick “the obvious intuitive conversion”, probably Omega wins, just by virtue of being so extreme.

The real claim I want to make has to do with Lauren being very far above the Pareto frontier. Maybe Lauren is very far from where the Pareto frontier would be without her? No, Omega is really quite far to the right2, Omega probably also scores higher on that metric3.

It’s important that Lauren is a big improvement over the Pareto frontier on both dimensions. And once we’re talking about 1) improvement over the Pareto frontier and 2) diminishing returns on individual dimensions, the right notion becomes obvious. Lauren increases the area under the Pareto frontier more than any other point4.

Really it should be love hypervolume but that didn’t fit inside the heart as nicely.

Some cursory googling says that this quantity is called hypervolume contribution, and that it’s an important concept in evolutionary multi-objective optimization. So there we go:

One reason I love Lauren is that she has the highest hypervolume contribution of any person in respect/comfort space.

Some quick nitpicks before moving on. Some may object to my choice to claim that I am more comfortable around a rock than around my own girlfriend. I think this comes down to your choice of the exact sense of “comfortable” you’d rather use. For example, if we mean “who would you rather have as emotional support if stranded on a desert island”, then I’m happy to say Lauren beats most rocks hands down. If we mean “who causes you the least distress minimized over moments”, the rock takes it . Choose whatever sense you want – I choose the one that makes my graph visualization the clearest. Others may object to my choice to claim that I respect John Von Neumann more than my own girlfriend. On my default sense of respect, I think this one is actually pretty up in the air. But on the graph I chose to nudge JVN to the right, both for illustrative purposes and to help avoid being accused of Bull Shitting.

Gemstone

  • Lauren is social magic
  • Aryan, Janet – found great ppl
  • Liam, Ian – deepened my relationships with people I already knew and was friendly with
  • How does she do it
  • Seek people out? Just be fun (aryan)? Something about the random calling? Fearlessness?

Wavelength

  • sometimes we’re on the same wavelength
  • it’s really fun
  • but it also feels kinda mysterious and magical
  • we’ve checked it a bit? I think? like talking about the stuff after we got sober
  • And I trust our ability to talk about subtle things in general and understand each other
  • But i still feel a bit of disbelief
  • Closeness to another human being

Entrepreneur

Finally, the one I’ve been saving for last because it’s most top-of-mind at time of writing. Lauren has long encouraged me to be “more entrepreneurial”. For a long time, it wasn’t particularly clear to me what she meant. My best guess was something like ”

  • Understanding what entrepreneurial means
  • Take a moment to thank lauren for wanting me to be my best self
  • She really believes in me man that’s so nice
  • Lowkey I never thought I would actually have this it would always just be Nietzschean cope/yearning
  • Doing some entrepreneurial stuff
  • gdoc
  • action items
  1. Well, there’s at least a conversion where the point ties for highest. ↩︎
  2. Here the word “OMAGA” burst into my mind unbidden and unwelcome. ↩︎
  3. Babe I promise I would rather date you than Omega, your brier score is just the right size the small ones scare me ↩︎
  4. All we need for this to be scale-independent is a fixed zero point for each axis, since linear transformations preserve relative areas. ↩︎