Probably, since a high-paying career often demands more responsibility.
Ok, that answers the question then. I chose $40k/yr. However it seems worth noting that I think this makes my answer misleading for most purposes so I’m not sure I can learn much meaningful from the poll. I would much prefer to be the partner who earned the larger figure. There are practical, social and psychological reasons why I would find that much easier and expect that all else being equal it is likely to make for a healthier relationship dynamic. Some of those predictions would even be controvertial to express.
It’s just that none of that preference is anywhere near strong enough to make up for having to do a crap load more work but being in a similar financial situation.
I guess you are male, and are thinking of a female spouse, right? I’m thinking that the social reason might be that people expect the man to be the higher earner; and the psychological reason that you’d be more comfortable being the dominant partner.
I’m female, and I have a great husband; and I voted to be the less-earning partner, not only because I don’t like to work my @$$ off either, but because I like my husband to be slightly dominant (his Captain Picard to my “number one”), or at least not to be dependent on me. Few things make a man more unattractive than being needy, either financially or emotionally.
I like my husband to be slightly dominant (his Captain Picard to my “number one”
Are you an Athol Kay fan?
Few things make a man more unattractive than being needy, either financially or emotionally.
Funny how these things can be interpreted. A rich submissive man could see giving a woman money as a submissive act (“she control’s my finances!”), while a dominant man could see it as a dominant act (“I take care of her!”)
Funny how these things can be interpreted. A rich submissive man could see giving a woman money as a submissive act (“she control’s my finances!”), while a dominant man could see it as a dominant act (“I take care of her!”)
What about the other cases? Like, say, a rich humanlike perfect-decision-theoretic agent? Or simply normal people that don’t think dominance or submission are inherent parts of their identities or interpersonal relationships?
I know that myself and a few other of my acquaintances often utterly confuse people who attempt to judge us on a “dominance vs submissiveness” axis, simply because we disregard any notion of “dominance status” and merely act according to some other system that doesn’t correlate well with either “trait”, which creates high variations of “dominant” or “submissive” behaviors in situations that seem strikingly similar to the evaluator.
I’ve been called (more than once) a very “incoherent” person on this basis.
My model is unfortunately not complete enough to reliably give good examples. I only observe those reactions, but I don’t myself understand how my behavior is “incoherent” or “confusing”. From inside, it feels like they’re the ones shackling their thoughts around binary axes and failing to think of things-as-things-are. Nevertheless, I can try.
In the basics, suppose a couple of colleagues and yourself (or schoolmates or somesuch, substitute as appropriate) are discussing a particular project. The D vs S axis seems (i.e. appears to me, though I don’t know if this passes i-turing) to predict that some people will be talking more, offering more ideas, while others will merely align with the dominant-type person/idea that fits their preference, and that these roles will tend to persist throughout instances (e.g. if you have multiple meetings) with people usually keeping their roles.
What does that axis make of people, like me and possibly other LW users, stay in the background analyzing the problem without affiliating with any of the dominant ideas, sometimes outright objecting to some ideas while denying the claim of being affiliated with its “opponent”, and sometimes offering a (presumed) better solution in some meetings when we feel more competent and able to provide one, but not otherwise?
Where, on the axis, do you classify these people?
Are they dominant? But they lack the characteristic trait of imposing their will—they have no followers, they do not grab for attention, they refuse to impose their solution (I used to only impose a solution when any of the alternatives under consideration would be catastrophic within context, but now in hopefully good instrumental rationality I attempt to signal myself as dominant in order to bring about somewhat more optimal outcomes), and only debate so far as to show the superiority of the idea/solution itself or the flaws of other ideas.
Are they submissive, then? Well, I would think not really, since they don’t align to any dominance, fail to signal dependence, and “The Laws of Physics, The Universe, And Everything” sounds like a pretty bad D vs S partner. Maybe they could be considered submissive to some “Logic” or “Physics” entity, but I doubt even D-S axis-minded people would go that far.
Of course, this example seems, even to me, quite contrived, but it’s basically an example of what I observe and experience.
I just act in certain manners which I consider completely natural, without conforming myself to any encompassing conception of self-personality or self-identity—merely acting the way I want to act, of which there is a subset of wanting to do things that I ought to do even when other parts of my brain don’t like it—as long as my memories and theories of my core self hold to the few principles I consider important (of which subsets, etc.). In reaction to my actions, people express (not always explicitly) some sort of confusion over what to expect of my behaviors, since I’m “all over the place” and “incoherent and unpredictable” (nowadays, this is another of those ambiguous comments which I personally take as a good compliment, since we can’t predict what a higher-than-human intelligence would do and all that).
In the context of “romantic” relationships, I’d pretty much be “the kind of people” that deliberately acts in a manner to please their partner (which in my model seems typically submissive), yet does so directly on their own impulse, without asking first, and does things the other might never have asked for or thought of (which in my model seems typical dominant behavior—just do stuff that brings the results and situations you want). All kinds of mixed signals get sent (or so I’ve been told), while from inside it’s basically just that I want to do something and I act on it.
Hopefully this helps understand what I’m saying. I’ve heard one hardcore qualify me as a “chameleon dominant”, where since I just do what I want (and subsets thereof), I’m fully dominant on the axis, but “disguise” myself into a submissive whenever I just happen to want to play such a role. I didn’t really have any problem with that or retorts / counterarguments at the time, and don’t care enough to think about it too much.
What kind of weird boundaries people want to draw around what and which one of those categories they put me in is usually not something I bother caring about unless the intellectual exercise is interesting or my life is on the line (the latter never happened so far, luckily).
Gregory Bateson wrote something about the relationship between status and some behaviors being dependent on culture. For example, the Czar would be watching the peasant children dance, but the Queen of England is waving to the crowd.
Yes, I read Athol’s blog, and that’s where I got the comparison. :-) And you’re right, giving money could be either dominant or submissive. In the latter case, the guy would be emotionally needy, which would be a big turn-off.
Conditioning on this, and all else being equal (assume prior of zero information / even spread of probability distribution), I simply have to take the 40$k. On a zero-information prior, the probabilities dictate that my intellectual time is most likely more important than that of a random other person, and that it is most likely that my job is not an optimal-utility one, such that I can do more good or produce more utility in my spare time than my spouse could in the same spare time obtained with the lower-paying job.
You only need to have an IQ / other measure of social-utility-production above the average (or mean? I haven’t actually worked out the maths, just replaying this from rote-learned stuff) in order for this to hold true, in terms of expected utility when you know nothing a priori about the spouse.
Are we each supposed to make up our own hypothetical, or are you giving us a standard one? I recommend giving us a standard one to provide more consistent results.
What? I’m confused. Isn’t that the point of money?
The context refers to money within a specific significant explicit and implicit contractual arrangement which happens to include some degree of sharing of resources. Influence on how money is spent within such arrangements is seldom in direct proportion to how much is respectively earned.
I am mostly indifferent. I can imagine a situation in which each of those circumstances would be comfortable, given the ideal spouse. My first reaction to this prompt was to consider in what ways the difference would affect my ego: Would I feel inferior to my spouse if I earned less? Or uncomfortable? Would I like to feel dominant over my spouse if I earned more? However, I realize that salary is not an indicator of intellectual capability or compatibility. This is, I believe, a more important determinant in the ideal spouse. I have my preference, which I will not disclose, as to whether or not I like to be the “less wrong” or more knowledgable partner.
Since I cannot be perfectly indifferent, I choose to earn $80k/year simply because that is the relatively-better choice for me as an individual, not because it is relatively-better than my spouse’s earnings.
I would want the 80k, given I’ve not met anyone who trusted my idea I got from an article at Cracked—that you’re supposed to help each other, and not be in debt to them, and therefore contribute the percentage you can, so if you make 20 % of the income, you’re responsible for 20 % of expenses—since I’ve yet to make more money than any potential partners. I basically only want to feel like I’m not freeloading on anyone, including my spouse.
I envision any spouse I end up with as someone that I am entirely comfortable sharing finances with.
Also when I think about people that I have dated and possible career futures for myself, lower earnings for me would likely mean that I’m spending more time on personal projects rather than being less successful in my career, but the opposite is true for any person I’ve been in a relationship with for over a year.
If you were married, would you rather: [pollid:118]
It would be great if you’d share your reasoning in the comments.
Is all else equal? In particular, do I have to do any more work to earn the $80k than the $40k?
Probably, since a high-paying career often demands more responsibility.
Ok, that answers the question then. I chose $40k/yr. However it seems worth noting that I think this makes my answer misleading for most purposes so I’m not sure I can learn much meaningful from the poll. I would much prefer to be the partner who earned the larger figure. There are practical, social and psychological reasons why I would find that much easier and expect that all else being equal it is likely to make for a healthier relationship dynamic. Some of those predictions would even be controvertial to express.
It’s just that none of that preference is anywhere near strong enough to make up for having to do a crap load more work but being in a similar financial situation.
I guess you are male, and are thinking of a female spouse, right? I’m thinking that the social reason might be that people expect the man to be the higher earner; and the psychological reason that you’d be more comfortable being the dominant partner.
I’m female, and I have a great husband; and I voted to be the less-earning partner, not only because I don’t like to work my @$$ off either, but because I like my husband to be slightly dominant (his Captain Picard to my “number one”), or at least not to be dependent on me. Few things make a man more unattractive than being needy, either financially or emotionally.
Are you an Athol Kay fan?
Funny how these things can be interpreted. A rich submissive man could see giving a woman money as a submissive act (“she control’s my finances!”), while a dominant man could see it as a dominant act (“I take care of her!”)
What about the other cases? Like, say, a rich humanlike perfect-decision-theoretic agent? Or simply normal people that don’t think dominance or submission are inherent parts of their identities or interpersonal relationships?
I know that myself and a few other of my acquaintances often utterly confuse people who attempt to judge us on a “dominance vs submissiveness” axis, simply because we disregard any notion of “dominance status” and merely act according to some other system that doesn’t correlate well with either “trait”, which creates high variations of “dominant” or “submissive” behaviors in situations that seem strikingly similar to the evaluator.
I’ve been called (more than once) a very “incoherent” person on this basis.
Your behavior sounds interesting. Could you give some examples?
My model is unfortunately not complete enough to reliably give good examples. I only observe those reactions, but I don’t myself understand how my behavior is “incoherent” or “confusing”. From inside, it feels like they’re the ones shackling their thoughts around binary axes and failing to think of things-as-things-are. Nevertheless, I can try.
In the basics, suppose a couple of colleagues and yourself (or schoolmates or somesuch, substitute as appropriate) are discussing a particular project. The D vs S axis seems (i.e. appears to me, though I don’t know if this passes i-turing) to predict that some people will be talking more, offering more ideas, while others will merely align with the dominant-type person/idea that fits their preference, and that these roles will tend to persist throughout instances (e.g. if you have multiple meetings) with people usually keeping their roles.
What does that axis make of people, like me and possibly other LW users, stay in the background analyzing the problem without affiliating with any of the dominant ideas, sometimes outright objecting to some ideas while denying the claim of being affiliated with its “opponent”, and sometimes offering a (presumed) better solution in some meetings when we feel more competent and able to provide one, but not otherwise?
Where, on the axis, do you classify these people?
Are they dominant? But they lack the characteristic trait of imposing their will—they have no followers, they do not grab for attention, they refuse to impose their solution (I used to only impose a solution when any of the alternatives under consideration would be catastrophic within context, but now in hopefully good instrumental rationality I attempt to signal myself as dominant in order to bring about somewhat more optimal outcomes), and only debate so far as to show the superiority of the idea/solution itself or the flaws of other ideas.
Are they submissive, then? Well, I would think not really, since they don’t align to any dominance, fail to signal dependence, and “The Laws of Physics, The Universe, And Everything” sounds like a pretty bad D vs S partner. Maybe they could be considered submissive to some “Logic” or “Physics” entity, but I doubt even D-S axis-minded people would go that far.
Of course, this example seems, even to me, quite contrived, but it’s basically an example of what I observe and experience.
I just act in certain manners which I consider completely natural, without conforming myself to any encompassing conception of self-personality or self-identity—merely acting the way I want to act, of which there is a subset of wanting to do things that I ought to do even when other parts of my brain don’t like it—as long as my memories and theories of my core self hold to the few principles I consider important (of which subsets, etc.). In reaction to my actions, people express (not always explicitly) some sort of confusion over what to expect of my behaviors, since I’m “all over the place” and “incoherent and unpredictable” (nowadays, this is another of those ambiguous comments which I personally take as a good compliment, since we can’t predict what a higher-than-human intelligence would do and all that).
In the context of “romantic” relationships, I’d pretty much be “the kind of people” that deliberately acts in a manner to please their partner (which in my model seems typically submissive), yet does so directly on their own impulse, without asking first, and does things the other might never have asked for or thought of (which in my model seems typical dominant behavior—just do stuff that brings the results and situations you want). All kinds of mixed signals get sent (or so I’ve been told), while from inside it’s basically just that I want to do something and I act on it.
Hopefully this helps understand what I’m saying. I’ve heard one hardcore qualify me as a “chameleon dominant”, where since I just do what I want (and subsets thereof), I’m fully dominant on the axis, but “disguise” myself into a submissive whenever I just happen to want to play such a role. I didn’t really have any problem with that or retorts / counterarguments at the time, and don’t care enough to think about it too much.
What kind of weird boundaries people want to draw around what and which one of those categories they put me in is usually not something I bother caring about unless the intellectual exercise is interesting or my life is on the line (the latter never happened so far, luckily).
Gregory Bateson wrote something about the relationship between status and some behaviors being dependent on culture. For example, the Czar would be watching the peasant children dance, but the Queen of England is waving to the crowd.
Yes, I read Athol’s blog, and that’s where I got the comparison. :-) And you’re right, giving money could be either dominant or submissive. In the latter case, the guy would be emotionally needy, which would be a big turn-off.
Conditioning on this, and all else being equal (assume prior of zero information / even spread of probability distribution), I simply have to take the 40$k. On a zero-information prior, the probabilities dictate that my intellectual time is most likely more important than that of a random other person, and that it is most likely that my job is not an optimal-utility one, such that I can do more good or produce more utility in my spare time than my spouse could in the same spare time obtained with the lower-paying job.
You only need to have an IQ / other measure of social-utility-production above the average (or mean? I haven’t actually worked out the maths, just replaying this from rote-learned stuff) in order for this to hold true, in terms of expected utility when you know nothing a priori about the spouse.
Is my spouse as gung-ho regarding effective altruism as I am?
Does it matter? If you earn more money, do you see yourself as having more say in how it is spent?
I don’t know, do I have more say?
Are we each supposed to make up our own hypothetical, or are you giving us a standard one? I recommend giving us a standard one to provide more consistent results.
Yes and yes.
What? I’m confused. Isn’t that the point of money?
The context refers to money within a specific significant explicit and implicit contractual arrangement which happens to include some degree of sharing of resources. Influence on how money is spent within such arrangements is seldom in direct proportion to how much is respectively earned.
I am mostly indifferent. I can imagine a situation in which each of those circumstances would be comfortable, given the ideal spouse. My first reaction to this prompt was to consider in what ways the difference would affect my ego: Would I feel inferior to my spouse if I earned less? Or uncomfortable? Would I like to feel dominant over my spouse if I earned more? However, I realize that salary is not an indicator of intellectual capability or compatibility. This is, I believe, a more important determinant in the ideal spouse. I have my preference, which I will not disclose, as to whether or not I like to be the “less wrong” or more knowledgable partner. Since I cannot be perfectly indifferent, I choose to earn $80k/year simply because that is the relatively-better choice for me as an individual, not because it is relatively-better than my spouse’s earnings.
I trust myself to spend the money on things I value more than I trust her to. This is a no brainer.
A better question would be 80k/40k or 80k/120k
Why the blazes would you want your spouse to be $80k poorer? You’d be throwing 40% of your household income down the drain.
edit I am an idiot.
Don’t care too much. $40k/yr seems to imply lesser working hours, which I would probably prefer.
It seems as though this poll breaks the comment RSS feed.
Do I need to delete it?
Earning less money than my partner would (in general) mean I could take of children more often with less economic cost to the family.
I didn’t immediately think of this, but when I read your comment it ended up being the deciding factor for me.
I would want the 80k, given I’ve not met anyone who trusted my idea I got from an article at Cracked—that you’re supposed to help each other, and not be in debt to them, and therefore contribute the percentage you can, so if you make 20 % of the income, you’re responsible for 20 % of expenses—since I’ve yet to make more money than any potential partners. I basically only want to feel like I’m not freeloading on anyone, including my spouse.
I envision any spouse I end up with as someone that I am entirely comfortable sharing finances with.
Also when I think about people that I have dated and possible career futures for myself, lower earnings for me would likely mean that I’m spending more time on personal projects rather than being less successful in my career, but the opposite is true for any person I’ve been in a relationship with for over a year.