christopherj comments on Is love a good idea? - Less Wrong

1 Post author: adamzerner 22 February 2014 06:59AM

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Comment author: christopherj 22 February 2014 06:37:19PM -1 points [-]

Your genes want you to reproduce successfully, they don't want to optimize for happiness. As such it may be necessary to make an extraordinary effort to acquire a decent mate, a task that goes against many of our other instincts. Such an effort is harder to do if you realize that the person in question is in fact fairly average and not The Most Perfect Person Ever. Note that some of the reasons you choose to fall in love are important yet hidden from your conscious mind, such as the importance of choosing a mate with a dissimilar major histocompatibility complex so as to produce healthier offspring. You should be careful when arrogantly rejecting the opinion of your specialized mate choice function with millions of years of evolutionary experience because you think you can make better choices in its area of expertise. Perhaps in the future we will be able to find mates that are agreeable to both our conscious and our unconscious, so that we don't get into a relationship with someone the other rejects. For example, in the future online dating sites will probably all require your DNA (which will be cheap to read) to check for genetic compatibility.

On a different note, you should be careful when you use a word that means both "hormone-induced insanity" and "a one word summary of many people's values system".