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jimrandomh comments on Open Thread: June 2009 - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
Gaining rational framework doesn't deprive you of emotional reasoning, but allows you to guide it in normally confusing situations.