[extropy-chat] Effective relationships

[Anders Sandberg]

Just a few preliminary observations on the Markov approach to relationships:

If one state is less stable than the others, the number of people found
there in stationary distribution is significantly lower than the others.
It is roughly an 1/(1-p) curve. Hence even a slight difference in
stability might be enough to make a social pattern rare.

The lower the transition probability between the states, the more
pronounced this effect is.

Eliezer pointed out that there is a state one cannot get out of, being
dead. One can of course run the whole thing with a constant inflow of new
singles and people dropping off, but given that the death probability
appears to be one order of magnitude smaller than the divorce probability
these days I think it can be safely ignored.

Even if triads may be less stable than dyads, that doesn't mean it has to
be like that. With the right social context, and perhaps some chemical or
neural tweaking we could invent entirely new forms of relationships.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University