up:: [[HD 2580 Six Pretty Good Books]] # Why Having A Perfectly Rational Partner Would Be Torture Imagine I was dating a Spok-like rational person and had the choice to switch to a highly emotional person instead. After reading Steven Pinker's book, Rationality, I can analyze the pros and cons of making this switch using some of the rational thinking tools he discusses inside: logic, probability, Signal Detection Theory, and Game Theory. To do this, I must define what I mean by rationality and my goal for the relationship. Then I can assess the pros and cons of switching partners. According to Steven Pinker, rationality is "the ability to use knowledge to attain goals." Knowledge, in turn, is standardly defined as "justified true belief." In exploring this inquiry, my goal is to foster a relationship for life.  Keeping the definition of rationality and goal in mind, I believe the main pros of switching to the emotional person are a fully rational person would be incredibly boring and hard to relate to. However, the cons are the emotional person would be more prone to falling for her emotional tendencies leading to bad arguments and impulsivity.  In my opinion, one of the main pros of switching to the emotional person is I would avoid succumbing to boredom. Boredom is one of the most powerful human motivators. When people are bored, they are willing to do almost anything to relieve that boredom: doom scrolling through Tik Tok, counting to 100, or playing Blobfish evolution--yup, that's actually a mobile game. If I were dating a Spok-like, rational person, she would quickly become boring. I have read Steven Pinker's book and understand all of the rational thinking tools. Using Pinker's definition of probability, "the strength of one's belief in an unknown set of affairs," I could predict the decision-making tools my girlfriend would use in every one of her decisions. In turn, little she did would surprise me. There would be no spontaneity, impulsity, randomness; there would be no life to the relationship. The relationship would be boring--as boring as the Wi-Fi shutting off on a Thursday night kind of boring. I couldn't foster a relationship for life with someone that bores me. The second major pro of switching to the emotional person is a Spok-like rational girlfriend would be one of the least relatable people on the planet. Imagine the dinner conversations with this person. "May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with Humans? I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant"; she sounds like a lot of fun to be around doesn't she? A spok-like rational person would be unlikely to make a wrong decision because they would use Bayesian reasoning in their decision-making. Bayesian reasoning is a method of statistical inference that theorizes you should base your confidence on a decision around the prior uncertainty in it. As new information comes in, your prior uncertainty changes by going up or down. Using Bayesian Reasoning, my rational girlfriend could make decisions based on probability. In effect, failure would occur mostly from getting unlucky rather than an inteptitude in her decision-making process. Therefore, she would be one of the most unrelatable people on the planet. I believe one thing that holds long-term relationships together is each partner balances out the flaws of the other and heightens the other's strengths. A relationship with this rational person would never survive over the long term because there is nothing to balance; she's too perfect.  However, there are some cons to switching to the emotional person. One main con is the emotional person would be more prone to falling for her emotional tendencies leading to bad arguments and impulsivity. For example, the emotional person might struggle to grasp logic making her fall for the Ad-Hoc fallacy. This fallacy occurs when you attack a person in an argument rather than their ideas. For example, we might argue about which city to live in, and then she would say, "Ya, well, I think your Minecraft addiction invalidates your opinion." First, off, mining diamonds in Minecraft is cool! But more importantly, bad arguments like these could break a relationship in the long term. The rational person, however, would be less likely to fall for logical fallacies like these because she uses Pinker's rational toolkit, which includes logic. Therefore, our relationship would unlikely fall apart from arguments gone wrong in the long term. In addition, the emotional person would be more prone to impulsivity. For example, if she found another shiny new partner, she might ditch me for them without a second thought. The rational person, however, would be more likely to go through a decision process before leaving. Therefore as long as I don't do anything drastic, like insult my in-laws, she would be less likely to break up with me out of impulse, helping the relationship long term. After explaining the main pros and cons of switching partners, I would ultimately choose to leave the rational girlfriend for the emotional one. My goal in making this rational inquiry is to foster a relationship for life. I can't see myself dating a Spok-like rational person long term. She would be too predictable and thus boring, and her rational thinking would make her unrelatable. Perhaps most importantly, there is something ethereal about human relationships that you can't explain in rational terms. Humans are naturally emotional beings, myself included. I don't think love is something you can condense to rationality. To live my life with someone who sees things only through rationality would be to lose out on a beautiful part of the human experience. So while I have argued about the pros and cons of switching girlfriends through a rational lens, maybe the most important reason is you can't explain love with rationality.