20 Comments

I think what you are saying about romance and art also describes politics as well. The correlation between political beliefs between partners has increased a lot in recent decades. People don't seem to be all that self aware of why they feel deeply the political feelings they do have. Functionally, openly sharing your political beliefs is a way to make friends. I've heard enough anecdotes in my life of people meeting their partner at politically themed events to make me think there is something to this.

I think maybe, with the great advancement of information technology (like the internet), political beliefs have become a more valuable mating signal, and so politics as a whole slipped more into a mode wherein we don't know our own motives and reasons for things, and that in turn has lead to politics as a whole becoming a "less reasonable" domain.

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The reasons we like or dislike things are often completely opaque to ourselves. For example, I dislike chocolate ice cream, chocolate cake, chocolate milk, and Hershey Milk Chocolate bars, but I like Nestle Crunch bars, brownies, and Count Chocula cereal. Why? I have no idea whatsoever!

I think it might be something similar to how our conscious minds lack low-level access to perceptual systems; we just get the result of the brain's processing and have no awareness of any of the raw data or the algorithms that process it, like how we can't recognize the two squares in the checker shadow illusion as being the same absolute shade of grey.

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False Equivalence Fallacy.

If you can't answer my question, then why did you reply to me? Or can I take your lack of answer as the answer?

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What are the pros of being a wonan who legally ties herself down to a single man for the rest of her life?

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It's trivial to put an order on the complex numbers. It's just that none of them are very useful.

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The recent rise in certain demographics of males voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool is a good thing for the survival of the species.

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What are the pros of being a man who legally ties himself down to a single woman for the rest of his life?

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I find it hard to believe that claim about language. Poetry, perhaps.

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As psychotherapy becomes more widely accepted, some people are willing to apply reason to their emotions, but only under confidentiality; many, I suspect, just feel that emotions are too private. They're difficult to reason about, too, and tricky to experiment on.

My experience of making a list as Darwin did is that I was mostly just prying open the box where I keep my emotions.

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Are you sure that maths and reason isn't a form of art? There is beauty in proofs, and perhaps it's the beauty that makes them atractive, and leads us to make use of them.

Rationality, particularly maths, has limits and breaks down. There are infinitely more true things that maths can't proove than it can proove. There are infinitely more numbers that can't be written down than can be, even between 0 and 1, even between any arbitrarily close numbers. Complex numbers can't even be ordered.

In the modern world we make great use of rationality and achieve much with it, but why would it be supreme, just because you can do a lot with it?

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I consider poetry and music as part of "art".

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The ability to do art 'for its own sake' seems to signal a valuable capacity. Also it is probably no coincidence we call beautiful both great art and good mates. It could be a halo-effect though.

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Any non-trivial math problem cannot be broken into doable steps. Nonetheless I agree that there is a lot of complexity in art. But to me it seems the complexity is created less intentionally in some sense vs. in math it is pre-existing and discovered.

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It's not just art. It's poetry and music, too."Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women..."https://www.goodreads.com/w... Plus "6 Reasons Every Woman Secretly Wants To Date A Musician":https://www.elitedaily.com/...

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I think you reject complexity as the explanation way to easily. I suspect that reason in art is not simply complex, it is intractably complex. There is no hope of dealing with it with reason. You compare to math but math that people do is less complex in that it is tractable in a very specific way: it can be broken down into doable steps. Not every problem is reducible to that. If a problem cannot be reduced to steps, each of which could be fit in one's mind and reasoned about, you cannot reason about it.

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In my observation once one understands the usual landscape of silencing and ostracism threats and take it into account, reason has great reach everywhere. Romantic choices usually make sense and aren’t very different from employment choices, and art is similarly relevant to both.

Understanding silencing and ostracism is difficult because we are reluctant to think worse of people by noticing the ways they are threatening us.

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