Open Thread: June 2009

Cyan

I provide our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Work your brain and gain prestige by doing so in E-prime (or not, as you please).

I need relationship advice and I trust the wisdom and honesty of this community more than most of my friends. I created a new account to ask this question.

I'm with an incredibly compassionate, creative woman. She excels at her job, which is a "helping profession," and one which I believe improves social welfare far more than most. The sex is outstanding.

But she loves magical thinking, she is somewhat averse to expected-utility calculations, my atheism, etc. She is, by her own admission, subject to strong swings of emotion and at greater than average risk of longer-lasting depression. We love each other but are scared that our differences may be too great.

How would you personally feel about a relationship like this? How should I go about deciding whether to continue this?

Added: We have been together more than 6 months. She has learned a decent amount about my way of thinking, but I have not pushed it on her. I frequently mention how great rationality is (but also mock myself to make sure we're all having fun).

I wish I had confidence that trying to convert her to my way of thinking would have net-benefits for her and for the world long-term, but I don't. Not that I'm convinced trying to convert her is a bad idea on utilitarian grounds either, it just seems risky.

I am pretty sure that most strong male rationalists are better off learning how the typical woman thinks than holding out for a long-term relationship with a strong female rationalist. Since this point is probably of general interest, I put it in a top-level post.

Converting her to your worldview sounds like a bad idea in general. An additional consideration that applies in your particular situation is that converting a helping professional from deontologism to consequentialism will more likely than not make her less effective at work (because helping pro... (read more)

2byrnema17y

With respect to making your decision, I would advise you to just spend more time with her. It usually took me about 18 months to figure out how I would finally feel about someone, long-term, that I was initially attracted to. After that period of time, differences were either sources of annoyance (or something more neutral) or sources of contempt. If the latter, for either one of you, you're "too different". (Things are complicated by the fact that there's always a little contempt in a relationship, but the contempt I'm talking about will tend to grow and feel more important than everything else over time.) In other words, I don't believe, a priori, that in order to be consistently rational, a rationalist should seek out another rationalist. You're probably seeking someone that complements you, and pushes you to more fully experience life, and that's why opposites attract. As long as you have the same core values about what matters to you both. It takes time to determine if you share those. Regarding the magical thinking that perplexes you: it doesn't seem to me that most rationalists actually understand what it is that magical thinkers believe. For example, if you think about it in terms of scientifically true and false, you're probably not thinking about it the right away. Magical thinkers know they're not making scientific statements. For example, it's not false to believe you have a soul. Whatever she really means by having a soul, she does have. That's why rational arguments don't work. I think it's a matter of communication: she's not really expressing what she means by soul, and you're not really arguing (if you were to) that what she doesn't have is the soul she's talking about. Her description of a soul may be naive and if she's says anything about it that is scientifically falsifiable, then she is confused about what she means. But whenever she gives a description that is not scientifically falsifiable, and you see it as false, you are probably interpret

0jimrandomh17y

Rationality sometimes goes badly wrong, when important details don't fit into a neat reasoning structure or a fatal flaw in argument goes undetected. Emotional reasoning sometimes goes badly wrong, when it deals with corner cases or situations too far from the environments it was evolved to handle. Rationality goes wrong less often, but crucially, they go wrong in different and mostly non-overlapping circumstances. If you have a different world view and reasoning style than your partner, then this might produce conflict, but it also gives you both far better sanity checking than any like-minded person could. You can't transform her mind, but you can act as a rationalist oracle. You speak of this as though it were only a flaw, but in fact it has both an upside and a downside. Use the upside, and mitigate the downside.