Lauren

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 about Lauren or about our relationship.

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 a significant ring of truth to it. I think it captures something substantial about what I value in my relationship with Lauren. Consider the following visualization:

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 a cluster with an outlier. Consider the following new and improved visualization:

This is more capturing the relevant dynamic. This is about how Lauren beats the best non-Lauren options, not how she compares to the vast majority that score much worse. Of the best non-Lauren options, they make a tradeoff between comfort and respect. There exist extremes on both ends 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: it goes back to being a claim about the low-scoring supermajority. 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 how comfortable I am around Omega or how much I respect the average 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 factor”, probably Omega wins, just by virtue of being so extreme.

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.

Ok, how about the highest respect*comfort? That certainly rings more true, and it makes it harder for Omega to win by being extreme on one dimension. And I think it is also an important fact about how Lauren compares to the competition. But it’s still not quite the claim I’m currently trying to make.

But a lot of the right pieces are here. It’s important that Lauren is a big improvement over the Pareto frontier. It’s important that the improvement is on both dimensions. And once we’re talking about 1) improvement relative to the Pareto frontier and 2) diminishing returns on each individual dimension, the right notion seems obvious. Lauren increases the area under the Pareto frontier more than any other point⁴.

Some cursory googling and GPT Chatting 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 in a respect/comfort configuration space, she has the highest hypervolume contribution of any person.

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 chose some one that strikes a good compromise between making my graph more visually appearing and remaining close to my default. 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.

Social Magic

Something about Lauren that I’d really like to understand better is her “social magic”. Lauren is incredibly fun to be around, and able to constantly pull great friends out of thin air. I have no idea how she does it. I don’t expect to be able to replicate the magic just by thinking about it for a few paragraphs, but I’d like to at least be able to understand better how it works. Here are my currently cached hypotheses – they’re mostly just observations about ways in which Lauren’s social behavior is unusual/special, plus a guess at how that unusual property might contribute to the magic.

1. One distinctive Lauren-ism is calling people out of the blue for specific narrow reasons. Lauren will think of a question during a conversation, think of some third party whose opinion she wants on that question, and just call them right then and there. And if they pick up she’ll pretty much just say hi, ask the question, get a response, say thanks and hang up (potentially including a few rounds of banter and/or clarification). This could be causally responsible for some of Lauren’s magic, or it could be downstream of some higher-level trait which is responsible. If it’s causally responsible, the most obvious mechanism would be increasing total contact time. Probably also there’s some diminishing returns on more contact time per “session”, so having many short contact sessions gets you a lot more bang for your buck. Other possible mechanisms: it makes other people feel more comfortable calling/contacting Lauren back, or makes others feel that Lauren is thinking of them, or otherwise successfully signals interest-in-being-friends to people that Lauren is interested in becoming/staying friends with. On the other hand, if this is downstream from the relevant causal factor, that factor could be a lot of things but my best guess would be something related to the next hypothesis I’m going to discuss.
2. Lauren and her friends routinely spend whole days at a time together. The same upstream/downstream technically applies here, but my guess is that this has to be pretty far upstream if it is relevant, because there’s a very clean origin story for it. This goes way back to when she was little – summertime with her girlfriends in Katonah where they would just mill around town together, all day or for days on end. It seems possible that the phone call Lauren-ism is just a manifestation of this behavior. Question is, how exactly does it bear on her modern-day social magic? One obvious possibility is that Lauren just had a lot more social hours growing up and developed better social skills generally. Another possibility is that Lauren imparts her extended-hang norm on friends who wouldn’t do that by themselves, leading to more time spent with them than would otherwise be achievable. I have one other salient guess, which is a bit less obvious but rings more true to me intuitively, which is that the extended-hang norm leads to a much more relaxed environment than the activity-based-hang norm. Unfortunately my judgement here is probably pretty crap, since I’m also much more relaxed around Lauren than around other folks in general, so I’m leaning pretty hard on some ability to infer causality intuitively which I may or may not have.
3. Another distinctive feature of Lauren’s social style is topic adventurousness and shit-testing⁵. I’m straying a bit from just listing hypotheses here and listing two things that are meaningfully distinct as one item, but they really do seem like a natural cluster. By topic adventurousness, I mean that Lauren is unusually willing to venture into territory that other people wouldn’t feel comfortable with. This leads to a pretty wide variety of outcomes. Lauren is more willing to directly disagree with someone and have a prolonged debate to settle the disagreement, she has a high tolerance (/fondness) for controversial⁶ conversation topics, is willing to share personal details, etc. The second half of the cluster is shit-testing – another famous Lauren-ism. Common examples include personal questions, deranged hypotheticals, or generally just suddenly steering a conversation into awkward/unusual territory. Lauren also famously doesn’t back down from these, and generally won’t accept a cop-out answer unless it’s clear the testee is really not going to provide anything more substantive.

While it’s not an explicit hypothesis, just listing these factors out does feel like it paints a pretty clear picture of some distinctive elements of Lauren’s social style, and it makes sense why that style would make her very magical. That impression makes me pretty happy to conclude that between these three elements I’ve captured a lot of the information needed to explain the Lauren magic. Now to actually try and do that explaining.

If I just try and draw connections right away, Lauren’s calling norms and hanging norms both seem to have some general “low activation energy” theme. A weak⁷ piece of corroborating evidence is that Lauren seems much more able to remain functional while hanging out with people than I am. She’s able to sit in front of the TV with friends and get work done at the same time at a reasonable pace, without getting sucked into one or the other, or hanging in a limbo of doing neither. At risk of making this into too much of a comparison with myself instead of an analysis of Lauren, I often feel that for my best working conditions I need all the stars aligned one way, and for my best social conditions I need all the stars aligned in a totally different way. If Lauren is less of a fusser⁸ and more able to function either way under many conditions, I think that would explain a lot of Lauren’s great success in mixed social/work environments, like many EA spaces (C*, conferences, Slacks, etc).

However, much of Lauren’s social magic also manifests in purely social settings, so there’s still more explaining to do. Another immediately plausible theme from the three elements I identified is something like a social fearlessness. This would connect the phone calls (which isn’t something most people do), with the adventurousness / shit testing. In both cases, I suspect⁹ people don’t do these things because of various downside concerns. Brief out-of-nowhere calls: “what if I annoy them”, “what if I’m overstepping”, possibly some aversion to friction around the start/end of the call. Adventurousness / shit testing: “what if they think I’m weird”, “what if I offend them”, “what if I embarrass myself”, “what if the conversation becomes awkward”, etc. In practice watching Lauren, these downsides almost never happen, and Lauren is able to collect almost exclusively the upsides. So why isn’t Lauren’s strategy the equilibrium strategy? There are a few possibilities:

1. Everyone else is just wrong about how often these downsides occur, and would be better off pursuing a more Lauren-like strategy.
2. Everyone else is more risk-averse than Lauren is, so her optimal strategy is more high-risk high-reward than average.
3. Everyone else is less skilled than Lauren is, and downside outcomes would happen to them more often if they pursued a Lauren-like strategy.

Unfortunately, my best guess is that a mix of all three is at play. Evidence for #1: my inner sim actually says that if I made Lauren-like phone calls more often, it would feel unusual but I would run very little risk of any negative outcomes. Evidence for #2: Lauren is pretty distinctly low-social-risk-aversion, she’s made direct comments like “I have a polarizing personality so some people disliking me doesn’t bother me much” multiple times¹⁰. Evidence for #3: my inner sim also says that if I made Lauren-like attempts at shit-testing, I would in fact get negative outcomes.

Distilling

One thing I do sometimes that makes me feel like I have strong sense of my own identity is trying to “distill” down to some facets of my personality that feel “fundamental”. I don’t think this is necessarily tracking features of my personality that are causally upstream of the rest, or the ways in which my personality is the most unusual. To the extent that it’s describable as any sort of principled exercise, it’s most like identifying high-level clusters/themes in my personality, and then identifying central members of those clusters/themes.

I’ve never attempted to do this on anyone else, but I’m interested in trying it for Lauren. I suspect it’ll be difficult, since I know Lauren pretty well, but still nowhere near as well as I know myself. In particular, this exercise leans heavily on trying to find patterns that cut across multiple areas of life, so it’s very sensitive to the minimum over how well you know someone across different areas. But Lauren and I have lived together and worked together and been in a relationship together, and I know her family and her hobbies and her life plans, so maybe I have a shot. And it would certainly be cool to feel like I have this sort of distilled picture of her.

Here is my starting brainstorm, just generating material to try and connect:

• OCEAN
  • High openness
  • High conscientiousness
  • High extraversion
  • Mixed (?) agreeableness
    • High: Lauren loves it when her friends get along, is very caring of people around her, attentive to social dynamics, is honest, endorses scope-sensitive altruism and also maintaining empathetic connection, etc.
    • Low: Lauren is willing to disagree/debate, not very defential (socially not necessarily epistemically), and wikipedia lists something called “tender-mindedness” as a high agreeableness trait that I don’t think Lauren has.
  • High neuroticism
• Chronological brainstorm
  • Elementary school
    • Athletics: soccer, kung fu, badminton (?), swimming (?)
    • Curiosity: chicks, butterflies, mantises, wood shop
  • Middle school
    • Gossip girl era
    • Creative writing workshop at Katonah library
  • High school
    • Early HS grindset era
    • Wilderness era
    • Writing workshop 2 at Bedford library
  • College
    • Hot girl manic era
    • Hot girl counterswing, “I don’t care what I look like”
    • Communism / philosophy era
    • Overachiever two internships era
    • Anxiety “swimmers in my eyes” era
    • Residency
  • Post-college
    • GCP
    • “I hate California” era, LinkedIn void / Magnify / early SPAR
    • Peak SPAR
      • Manifest
    • Stelly!
• Magic the Gathering colors
  • White
    • Humanism, welfarism, egalitarianism
    • Wants to personally be vegeterian/vegan
    • Overstimulation
    • Trancey music
  • Blue
    • Intellectual curiosity / persistence, doesn’t want to leave questions unanswered
    • Ops and systematization: docs, sheets, asana (splash white)
    • Values honesty / wants to know some important unpleasant truths
    • Communism phase (splash white)
  • Black
    • Moral anti-realism
    • Crumbl cookies, luxurious meals
    • Shit-testing
  • Red
    • Wants to maintain emotionally responsive connection to tragedies
    • Cute aggression
    • Competitiveness (splash black)
  • Green
    • Wants her friends to be friends with each other (splash white)
    • Doesn’t want to know all unpleasant truths
    • The Mary Arts (splash black)
    • Girlypop stuff: loves being a girl, clothes, maintaining girlypop at C*, book nooks
    • Creative writing, singing

After that brainstorm, two distinct things jump out at me that I don’t think I had explicitly understood before.

• Lauren likes to be excellent at what she does. It’s not enough for her to be good at it. Lots of examples of Lauren thriving in a domain where she’s skilled (C*, writing workshops). Lots of examples of her pushing herself insanely hard in order to reach that level (two internships era, taking on Manifest during peak SPAR, extreme competitiveness during casual games). However, there are also examples of her getting discouraged, burned out, or otherwise tripped up by the psychological wake of the extremely high standard she holds herself to (quitting soccer, not looking at grades, anxiety era, perfectionism during residency / SPAR)
• Lauren’s relationship with leisure/hobbies is primarily green! I think mine is mostly red, and I was sort of assuming that her leisure stuff would fall under red because it’s expressive/emotive, but I think that’s actually not right. I think Lauren’s aesthetic sense is primarily receptive rater than projective in a sort of green way, as if taste is “out there” in the world and her efforts are to better attune to it rather than to create it. I don’t know a ton about her internal philosophy of creative writing, but my experience working together with her on a story felt similarly green / receptive-of-the-ideal. Lauren also seems to identify with these aspects of herself – she sometimes says that she very much enjoys being a girl, and she endorses bringing some of that energy to her workplace, in a way which also suggests green to me.

This is actually surprisingly nice. There’s a pretty clean three-part tension that explains a lot of what drives Lauren. She holds herself to an incredibly high standard, and is able to exert tremendous efforts to reach that standard. But even thinking about failing is highly aversive, which can lead to spiraling, premature discouragement, avoidance, etc. She also has a strong connection with the parts of herself that just enjoy things separately from her ambitions, and needs to balance those parts so that they are compatible with her standards (foodie-ism vs vegeterianism) and aversions (not burning herself out so much from work that she loses connection to ability to enjoy things).

Based on this analysis, I propose the Grand Unified Lauren State Triangle (GULST):

Zooming Out

So, I know in an objective sense that Lauren and I are very close. There are a lot of easy ways to know that. I’ve known her for over a decade, over half my life now, and like 95% of my sentience-weighted life. We share a lot of our values and worldview, both in general and in relationships specifically. We’ve lived together, we’ve done long distance, we’ve traveled together (and had COVID together), we had our horrible unemployed eras together. Furthermore, I know in an objective sense that Lauren and I are unusually close – our relationship is very special, not just in the sentimental sense but also in the literal frequency sense. I think there are probably very few relationships like ours in the world.

But because Lauren is such a constant feature of my life, this also just feels very normal. Of course that’s how our relationship is, how else would it be? It’s always been like that, at least as long as I can meaningfully remember. And I think that’s what they call “taking your wonderful girlfriend for granted”, so I’m going to make an explicit effort to not do that.

When I step back for a moment, and think about our relationship… oh holy shit¹¹. I am so lucky. From behind the veil of ignorance, I would never expect to end up with a love like what I have with Lauren. In fact from behind the veil of ignorance my current relationship outcome is almost unbelievably good, like top <1% good relative to my expectations.

It didn’t have to be this way. We’ve had some pretty precarious moments. We’ve split up and reconnected. There were a lot of moments that didn’t have to go the particular way they went. I find myself wondering, a little bit, if my modal theory should be “there’s some more robust reason¹² we ended up together” rather than “we got very lucky” because of just how lucky we seem to have gotten. Either way, even if there is some systematic effect that drew us together, it surely doesn’t extend all the way back to behind the veil of ignorance. So no matter what, I’m incredibly grateful¹³ for what I have with Lauren.

There’s another thought here that’s kind of obvious but sort of wild when I try to feel it intuitively. Probably Lauren and I will get married. Probably we’ll be together for years after that. Possibly we’ll be together until the heat death of the universe. All this richness that we have so far is just ten-ish years! Both of our parents have been together twice that long, and it’s not unheard of for couples to be together for four, five, six times that long. Never mind 1e100 years (prior to parallel copies and subjective speedup). Ten years is a downright normal amount of time to be together, and I think we’ve already done something really amazing with it. It’s hard to imagine what we could do with just another decade on top of what we’ve had so far, but it’s really, really exciting.

I love you babe <3

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. ↩︎
5. to be clear, not the PUA thing exactly, but kinda close. ↩︎
6. see Haidt, J., Koller, S. & Dias, M. (1993) ↩︎
7. since I’m thinking of it post-hoc ↩︎
8. technical term. ↩︎
9. cf typical-mind ↩︎
10. Caveat, there are certainly times where Lauren worries about people disliking her. My guess is that she’s less risk averse than usual w.r.t certain types of dislike. Another possible explainer of this difference is variation in risk aversion over different people. I’m not able to immediately think of an obvious trend of either form, but “types of dislike” seems weakly more plausible overall. ↩︎
11. This mental move is the trying-to-feel-it scope sensitivity move. Which means that I’m so lucky to be with Lauren that it literally takes effortful scope sensitivity to appreciate how lucky it is. Which is crazy. ↩︎
12. There are obviously many robust reasons to expect some of these outcomes to be correlated: stable facts about our personality that make us compatible, normal relationship stuff. We get along, our lifestyles are compatible, mutual attraction, etc. These are just the reason that any individual relationship hangs together day after day. The kind of thing I’m discussing here is more like (for example) COVID bringing us back into contact in person. It’s hard to see how any systematic factor could have contributed to that, and we won a lot of similar coin flips. ↩︎
13. Specifically w.r.t getting lucky. I’m obviously also grateful that our relationship is so good, independently of whether it’s ex ante likely or not. ↩︎