The second way also takes advantage of psychological commitment and consistency. First, you commit to a procedure for determining whether to worry about X, like getting stats from Wikipedia and doing some arithmetic. Only then do you actually do this and find out what the answer is—and by then, no matter what the result, you’ve already made the decision to accept it!
If both participants are rational the second allows the worried party to get real data and execute an update, allowing a real emotional worry to go away. This allows people to have less anxiety about their relationships. This makes relationships with rationalists orders of magnitude better than relationships with people who are merely smart and reasonable.
I don’t think I could go back to dating a nonrationalist.
The second way also takes advantage of psychological commitment and consistency. First, you commit to a procedure for determining whether to worry about X, like getting stats from Wikipedia and doing some arithmetic. Only then do you actually do this and find out what the answer is—and by then, no matter what the result, you’ve already made the decision to accept it!
Definitely a handy technique.
If both participants are rational the second allows the worried party to get real data and execute an update, allowing a real emotional worry to go away. This allows people to have less anxiety about their relationships. This makes relationships with rationalists orders of magnitude better than relationships with people who are merely smart and reasonable.
I don’t think I could go back to dating a nonrationalist.