- **Name:** [Mateusz](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Pl-Mateusz.ogg)
- **Born:** 1998
- **Height:** 180 cm
- **Orientation:** Straight
- **Relationship style:** Mono/Poly (in the process of being determined)
- **Location:**
- London 🇬🇧 --> 2024-09-12 Berlin 🇩🇪 ([LWCW](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tBYRFJNgvKWLeE9ih/less-wrong-community-weekend-2024)) --> ~2024-09-20 somewhere remote-ish 🇵🇱 --> TBD ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯

I am mainly (and ultimately) interested in a primary long-term romantic relationship. I'm also open to short-to-mid-term dating in the meantime (and maybe as a build-up to something longer).

## About me/personality

I am somewhat agentic. One datapoint in this direction is that halfway through high-school I switched schools without the knowledge of my parents in order to be able to homeschool myself. It required me to jump through a bunch of hoops, the parents reacted with horror (yes, I should have played it out differently), but in the end it all worked out well; it was definitely a better decision than staying in "normal high school" (which would have lead me to medium depression).

More generally, I have a somewhat optimizer-y approach to life; aiming to figure out what I want and how to ensure what I want to happens. (Obvious reflective caveats that I'm not sure what I want, what I want changes, I have limited optimization power and so on.)

I like this aspect of my personality and aspire to be even more agentic.

I'm a LessWrong'er[^1] and Effective Altruist. I'm an atheist and I'm happy to call LW and EA my "religion". I'm interested in exploring other communities, such as RadicalxChange and Game-B.

Many people told me something like "are you Asperger's?" or "come to me today; you'll meet my other autistic frined". I don't have a diagnosis. I know some people who seemed to me to be less autistic than myself but got the diagnosis nevertheless. Do what you want wish with that information. (If that's already TMI for you, you probably don't want to date me.)

**Personality:** I'm above 90th percentile on Openness and Conscientiousness, average-ish Agreeableness, Extraversion, Honesty-Humility, and Emotionality/Neuroticism.

**Drug use:** I don't drink or smoke. I sporadically use nicotine gums/tablets because I like their impact on my cognition and I find nicotine's effect pleasant. I've had ~20 psychedelic trips (most of them either LSD or 4-HO-MiPT) but right now I'm mostly interested in DMT, salvia, and (sparingly) kratom.

**Diet:** Mostly vegan (primarily for ethical reasons and due to habit).

**Chronotype:** Morning lark. I typically go to sleep early and wake up around 04:30-05:00 and start the day with a workout and meditation. I let myself loose during social events/retreats/parties etc.

**Communication style:** I mostly strongly dislike smalltalk and prefer direct, tactful communication over indirect communication (ask/tell culture-ish over guess culture-ish). I sometimes ask weirdly specific questions just because I'm curious (a friend once commented on it: "you don't ask, you send requests").

## What I like to do

- Exercise, primarily calisthenics, and running, sometimes gym. Currently, I exercise somewhat intensely every morning. I like trying out new forms of physical activity.
- Expand my understanding and skills: math, programming, biology, history, philosophy, doing-things-effectively.
- I especially like a lot learning with somebody else, reading from a textbook aloud, staring together at the whiteboard, trying to understand the leaps of logic made by the author.
- Working together on a creative/coding project.
- Deep/abstract/nerdy/philosophical conversations.
- [Is The United States conscious?](https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm) (*[Go](https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Snails.htm)[ng](https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf)*?)
- [What would happen](https://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/2022/1/17/episode-85-the-siege-that-changed-all-of-history) if Assyrians conquered [Jerusalem in 701 BCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_siege_of_Jerusalem)?
- [Is the Solomonoff prior malign?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tr7tAyt5zZpdTwTQK/the-solomonoff-prior-is-malign)
- [Should we maximize helium?](https://joecarlsmith.com/2020/12/20/alienation-and-meta-ethics-or-is-it-possible-you-should-maximize-helium)
- [List of my favorite stuff](https://matthewbaggins.github.io/favorite-stuff.html).
- Meditation (regularly; want to get seriously better at it), psychedelics (currently preference for short-but-intense trips over long trips).
- Reading fiction.
- Being around people who largely share my interests, attitudes, and values.


## Things I want to give a good try

(This list is to be expanded.)

- Participate in social experiments, e.g. new ways of organizing society, coliving/[group houses]?
- Finally learn to play an instrument well (keyboard?), maybe understand music theory.
- Scuba diving in a coral reef.

## What I value

Have you seen *[The Goddess of Everything Else](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbwp4PbWYzw)*? *[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurren_Lagann)*? I think these are the two works of art that shaped [the way I orient emotionally toward the possibility of brighter future] the most. (I haven't read *Progress and Poverty* yet but I have some suspicion it may have a similar effect on me once I read it (hopefully/probably soon-ish).)

I don't quite know [what I'm fighting for](https://mindingourway.com/you-dont-get-t/). I know I want a world without disease and unnecessary suffering. I know I want Civilization/Humanity to wisen, improve, mature, become [more of what we want to be] and expand into the stars. I want us to decode the mysteries of the universe and mathematics, decode the hidden structure, create works of art and ingenuity beyond any description. I want to contribute whatever optimization power I can squeeze out to contribute to that project.

---

Unsurprisingly, I [identify with]/[am a member of] LessWrong and Effective Altruism, with some trans-humanist-ish leanings. I am also interested in some other movements, primarily RadicalxChange and Game-B, though my engagement with them so far has been passive.

I dedicated my career to solving AI alignment and/or advancing our collective sanity. Currently focusing on the first one of these, we'll see how much progress I make in the next two years.

I sympathize with [consequentialist/utilitarian]-ish vibes but I don't consider myself a consequentialist/utilitarian. Certainly, I am not a negative utilitarian, or antinatalist. I don't buy into The Repugnant Conclusion. I care about wild animal suffering but I also care about Green. I want to eliminate unnecessary suffering, but also view happiness as something between a proxy and only one component of The Good.[^2]

## I believe some strange things

I have some views that at least some people consider crazy. In case it's not obvious, agreement with any of that is not a prerequisite for dating me. Moreover, ability to disagree in an interesting way is a plus.

- I got around to consider LessWrong and Effective Altruism as "my religion".
- [Illusionism about consciousness]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusionism))
- I'm pretty confident that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. If I were to use Chalmers' terminology, the hard problem of consciousness reduces to the meta-problem but the meta-problem is an easy problem.
- I'm strongly convinced about normative anti-realism (or maybe pluralist realism in Clarke-Doane's terminology but I haven't quite worked out the conceptual intricacies because other things are priorities).
- AI is an existential risk ([→ ⏹️ PauseAI!!!](https://pauseai.info/))

## Important in a partner

My ultimate romantic goal is to find a long-term partner who shares my values, and with whom I will build a co-constructive relationship, where both sides aid each other in becoming more of what they want to be and figuring out what they want to be. In the meantime (and for the purpose of finding such), I'm open to short-term and mid-term dating.

(I'm currently open to both monogamy and polyamory but in the end I certainly want to settle on one of them, rather than anything in-between-ish, based on which one turns out to be more compatible with me.)

- I probably don't want to have children. It's not a dealbreaker if you have children from the previous relaitonship.
- Open/transparent/direct communication, ask/tell culture, more so than guess culture.
- Large overlap in core values.
- Intelligence, creativity, cultivation of intellectual activity.
- Different from me in interesting ways
- Openness, conscientiousness, some disagreeableness.

**RELATIONSHIP DEALBREAKERS:**

- Demand to cease/[unnaturally downplay] close relationships with other women.
- Doxastic violence (i.e. pressuring me or others to adopt or articulate views against one's best judgment/conscience).

## How I want to live

- Over the next two years, I'd like to finally settle somewhere somewhat permanently, most likely in (or nearby) a big city where a lot of AI alignment/LW/EA stuff is happening, so that I can do my work effectively.
- Likely with a/the partner, or at least with a/the partner nearby.
- With strong community, including a substantial number of strong ties, nearby.
- So currently the most plausible candidates are London and Bay Area, maybe Prague.

## Contact

- Email: [Last name of the famous Hobbit] + [My first name in English] + [at]gmail.com
- Discord: `matthewbaggins`

## Footnotes

[^1]: I prefer "LessWrong'er" to the overloaded "rationalist".
[^2]: I'm also not certain whether Good is actually good as a concept.