Today's post, 20 January 2009 was originally published on 20 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Our sympathy with other minds makes our interpersonal relationships one of the most complex aspects of human existence. Romance, in particular, is more complicated than being nice to friends and kin, negotiating with allies, or outsmarting enemies - it contains aspects of all three. Replacing human romance with anything simpler or easier would decrease the peak complexity of the human species - a major step in the wrong direction, it seems to me. This is my problem with proposals to give people perfect, nonsentient sexual/romantic partners, which I usually refer to as "catgirls" ("catboys"). The human species does have a statistical sex problem: evolution has not optimized the average man to make the average woman happy or vice versa. But there are less sad ways to solve this problem than both genders giving up on each other and retreating to catgirls/catboys.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Sympathetic Minds, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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