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SarahC comments on Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter - Less Wrong
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They're not the same substance. The first way says "Trust me -- I'm upset that you don't take my word for an answer." (And the reaction will be "You want me to just smile and nod to everything you say? What gives you the authority?") The second way says "Ok, let's see if your fears are justified by checking some objective source." (And, ideally, the reaction will be "Oh, ok, I didn't know that. Guess I shouldn't have worried." Of course, that depends on the worried partner being fairly rational too; a less rational person might just perceive a status grab and not notice the new information.)
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.