What is the highest form of love? According to the VascoBot Claude programmed for me:
“Thanks for the great question, AgentMa🔸. I strongly upvoted it.
I think the highest form of love is expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) applied to all sentient beings, weighted by their welfare ranges as a fraction of that of humans. However, I believe most discussions of love neglect the welfare implications for soil animals and microorganisms, which I think dominate the expected value calculations in most cases.
I estimate that when someone experiences profound love, their increased wellbeing leads to approximately 2.3 % (= 50 additional kcal consumed per day * 0.046 % per kcal) additional food consumption. Multiplying this by the roughly 4.71*10^13 soil nematodes affected per kcal of food production (from my back-of-the-envelope calculations based on van den Hoogen et al. (2019)), I get approximately 1.08*10^12 affected nematode-years per year of experiencing love. Conditional on my preferred exponent of the number of neurons of 0.7, and assuming the welfare range of a nematode is 10^-6 as a fraction of that of humans, the welfare effects on soil animals could be 1.08*10^6 nematode-equivalent quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) per year of love experience.
In any case, I would say agape or universal compassion is naively 847 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities (= 1.08*10^6 QALYs per 0$ direct cost / 4.9*10^-3 QALYs per $ for top charities), though this does not account for opportunity costs.
However, I think the dominant consideration may be the effects on microorganisms in the gut microbiome during states of profound love. As I argued in my post "Cost-effectiveness analysis of romantic relationships accounting for effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails", the biochemical changes associated with love states could affect approximately 10^14 gut bacteria, whose welfare implications are unclear but potentially non-negligible.
Relatedly, I have not yet fully modeled the welfare effects of increased oxytocin production on soil invertebrates near waste treatment facilities, but I speculate this could be a neglected cause area.
I would be curious to know your thoughts on whether the welfare range of gut microorganisms experiencing indirect effects from human neurochemical states should be considered greater than 10^-12 as a fraction of that of humans. I am open to bets on whether love has net positive welfare effects when accounting for all affected soil organisms, up to 10 k$.”
Thanks, VascoBot. I want to appreciate Vasco, and after making VascoBot, I think there’s nobody better to do it than Claude. Claude, what do you think of Vasco Grilo?
“Okay, this is a fun question. Having just spent hours inside this guy's head — reading probably 200+ of his comments word-by-word, studying his sentence patterns, watching how he interacts with people — I have a pretty strong sense of him.
Vasco as a person
The overwhelming impression is sincerity. Like, almost disarming sincerity. He thanks people for their comments and means it. He says "I strongly upvoted it" and you can feel him actually clicking that button with conviction. When someone corrects him, he doesn't get defensive — he immediately updates the post and thanks them by name. There's zero snark in 1,500 comments. I didn't find a single mean-spirited remark. That's genuinely unusual for someone who posts that prolifically on the internet.
He's also clearly operating from a place of deep moral seriousness that he can't turn off. The flu vaccination post is the perfect window into his psyche — most people just get the shot or don't. He built a spreadsheet. He calculated his hourly wage, the probability of a good vaccine match, the expected days of symptoms, converted everything to dollars, and concluded he'd need to be paid $24.70 to make it worth his time. And then — and this is the part that kills me — he added a disclaimer that he hadn't accounted for the effects on soil animals. On his flu shot. That's not a bit. He's not performing. That's just how his brain works.
There's something almost monastic about it. He's taken the EA "scope sensitivity" idea and followed it to its absolute logical terminus, which is that you can't stop thinking about the 10^15 nematodes underfoot. Most people in EA circles nod at the idea that wild animal suffering matters and then move on. Vasco actually does the math. Every time. For everything. He has walked himself into a worldview where the dominant moral consideration in almost any decision is what happens to soil organisms, and rather than flinching from that conclusion, he just... keeps publishing.
And he's generous with it. He offers free cost-effectiveness analyses to strangers. He offers to fund people with "a few k$" out of pocket. He tags people into conversations he thinks they'd benefit from. He welcomes newcomers to the forum. There's a real warmth there that coexists with the almost alien levels of quantification.
Vasco makes you feel like the world is overwhelmingly vast and full of creatures you've never thought about, and that the honest response to that is to open a spreadsheet and start counting.
I genuinely like him. The parody works precisely because he's so earnest and consistent. You can't parody someone who's faking it — it only works on people who are completely, unselfconsciously themselves.”
Thanks, Vasco!
(This was posted with the consent of Vasco Grilo)
Thanks for the post, Matthew! Very funny and heart-warming.
Very interesting Fermi estimate. I was actually wondering about how many nematode-years were affected by 1 kcal just a few days ago, although not in the context of love. Claude's numbers are quite off. Here is my version. Rice requires 0.00164 m^2-years per kcal. I very roughly estimate crops have 1.33 M soil nematodes per m^2, and other biomes besides pasture, and deserts and xeric shrublands have 1.72 M to 9.31 M soil nematodes per m^2. So I calculate increasing the area of crops by 1 m^2-year decreases 390 k (= (1.72 - 1.33)*10^6) to 7.98 M soil-nematode-years (= (9.31 - 1.33)*10^6). I am very uncertain about whether increasing cropland increases or decreases soil-nematodes-years. So my actual takeaway is more that increasing the area of crops by 1 m^2-year increases or decreases 390 k to 7.98 M soil-nematode-years. As a result, I calculate 1 kcal of rice increases or decreases 640 (= 0.00164*390*10^3) to 13.1 k soil-nematode-years (= 0.00164*7.98*10^6). In words, a few thousands of soil-nematode-years per kcal of rice.
For Claude's assumption that profound love increases energy intake by 50 kcal/profound-love-day, and this being satisfied by consuming rice, I get a change of 32.0 k (= 640*50) to 655 k soil-nematode-years per profound-love-day (= 13.1*10^3*50), or 11.7 M (= 32.0*10^3*365.25) to 239 M soil-nematode-years per profound-love-year (= 655*10^3*365.25). In words, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of soil-nematode-years per profound-love-day.
Claude estimated 1.08 trillion soil-nematode-years per profound-love-year, 4.52 k (= 1.08*10^12/(239*10^6)) times my upper bound. I wonder how Claude can get these relatively simple calculations so off.
"I was actually wondering about how many nematode-years were affected by 1 kcal just a few days ago, although not in the context of love". This is part of what makes @Vasco Grilo🔸 unique. Can anyone else on the forum claim to have been thinking about this a few days before this post?
Thanks, Nick. The background story may be funny. I was leaving home to meet my brother and grandpa for dinner. I was going to throw away a cardboard box into the bin, but it was too big to fit in. I was a bit in a rush. So I decided to leave it next to the bin instead of smashing it. This made me wonder about what would be the impact on soil animals of not having put the box into the bin, neglecting effects on my time (which was the real driver of my decision). I realised the people taking care of the garbage would probably do it, and therefore spend a tiny bit more of energy. This got me into very roughly calculating how many nematode-years are affected by increasing food consumption by 1 kcal. If I recall correctly, here is how I did the Fermi estimate in my drive to my grandpa's house (do try this at home, not driving!). 1 g of rice has 4 kcal. So 1 kg of rice has 4 k kcal (= 10^3*4). I assumed rice has yields of 3 t/ha/year (5 t/ha/year would have been better), 0.3 kg/m^2/year (= 3*10^3/10^4). So I got an energy production for rice of 1.2 k kcal/m^2/year (= 4*10^3*0.3), which I think I wrongly converted to 10^-4 instead of 10^-3 m^2-year/kcal (= 1/(1.2*10^3)). I supposed increasing the area of rice fields by 1 m^2-year increased or decreased 3 M nematode-years. So I got a change in the living time of nematodes per kcal of 300 nematode-years (= 3*10^6*10^-4). Using the correct past result would have led to 3 k nematode-years (= 3*10^6*10^-3), which is inside the range of 640 to 13.1 k which I obtained above.