And as another example, I’m a female who’s love gets staggeringly strong sometimes, maybe like the author’s wife, yet I still want to support effective altruism rather than giving to relatives impulsively. I have a male friend with some autism traits and probably lower love feelings, who’s not at all interested in effective altruism, but gives generous impulsive gifts to people he knows. So I really don’t know if there’s a correlation between love and altruism, and if there if, in which direction.
Thanks, that’s interesting. One point I’m trying to work through is the importance of salience/ability to imagine others—i.e. is your ‘autistic-traits friend’ simply not able to hold a salient picture of people/animals outside of their social circle.
So while their gap between ‘any given person’ and ‘person I actually know’ is minimal; they simply are not able to imagine ‘an abstract person’ so their love of people outside their social circle is zero. Similarly, if someone in their social circle moves away or something, that person is no longer salient and is effectively excluded from all considerations of love (until the friend is prompted to think of them).
Conversely: since you are thinking about effective altruism, the potential recipients are salient to you rather than ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’.
To fit it into the ‘factors’ I consider above, ‘shared-experiences’ are all forgotten and set to zero.
And as another example, I’m a female who’s love gets staggeringly strong sometimes, maybe like the author’s wife, yet I still want to support effective altruism rather than giving to relatives impulsively. I have a male friend with some autism traits and probably lower love feelings, who’s not at all interested in effective altruism, but gives generous impulsive gifts to people he knows. So I really don’t know if there’s a correlation between love and altruism, and if there if, in which direction.
Thanks, that’s interesting. One point I’m trying to work through is the importance of salience/ability to imagine others—i.e. is your ‘autistic-traits friend’ simply not able to hold a salient picture of people/animals outside of their social circle.
So while their gap between ‘any given person’ and ‘person I actually know’ is minimal; they simply are not able to imagine ‘an abstract person’ so their love of people outside their social circle is zero. Similarly, if someone in their social circle moves away or something, that person is no longer salient and is effectively excluded from all considerations of love (until the friend is prompted to think of them).
Conversely: since you are thinking about effective altruism, the potential recipients are salient to you rather than ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’.
To fit it into the ‘factors’ I consider above, ‘shared-experiences’ are all forgotten and set to zero.