Limerence Messes Up Your Rationality Real Bad, Yo

I've also concluded that in-love epistemics are terrible from my own research. For instance, in this n=71 study where college students write about a time they've rejected a romantic confession and a time they were rejected:
- suitors report that rejectors are mysterious, but rejectors do not report being mysterious
- suitors severely overestimate probability of being liked back
- suitors report that rejections are very unclear, and while suitors report the same, it is to a much lesser degree/frequency.

I've also been overconfident of compatibility and of mutual affection in my own life (n=1)
 

However, I think there's something to be said for having something (someone?) to protect [LW · GW]. 
Eliezer mentions in Inadequate Equillibria using extremely bright lights to solve his partner's Seasonal Affective Disorder - which was not medical consensus, and only after Eliezer's experiment are more "official" trials for this intervention being tested.
Or in my case, I was so heartbroken over a bad ex that I researched romance science, learned about the similarity between limerance and OCD, and tried a supplement that cured my heartbreak. I wouldn't normally try new drugs nor browse google scholar, but I was really motivated.

I also wonder if rationality messes up your limerence. Certainly, I find that a daily attempt to try and think more rationally has had a small-moderate effect on my emotional range and registration.

I like that you brought this up, and the tone with which you did so. Nice mental handles via the graph. And I like that you're basically highlighting a question rather than an answer; that tends to be richer for me to encounter.

I'd like to highlight a couple of implicit things lurking in the background here. They're common in LW culture AFAICT, so this is something like an opportune case study.

• You seem to be assuming that limerence messing with your rationality is bad because rationality is the thing you want to have govern your life. But if your CEV includes limerence, then this limerence override is actually revealing ways in which your rationality-as-is is incompatible with your CEV. Even if limerence is screwing up your life in ways that your rationality would successfully address if it weren't for the limerence. If you have to choose, you want to live in global alignment with your CEV, not locally pointwise convergence on what you currently think your CEV is. This might mean seriously screwing up things locally in order to bridge the parts of you that you currently endorse with other parts that you don't yet know you want to value.
• Strong feelings overwhelming your thinking, which in turn warps your choices, is a problem only inasmuch as you base your choices on your thoughts. This basic inner design choice is also why Goodhart's Law has room to reinforce cognitive biases, and why social pressure can work to make people do/think/believe things they know to be wrong. There's an alternative that looks like building your capacity to be stably present with sensation prior to thought. This gives you a firm place to stand that's outside of thinking. It's the same place from which you can tell that a mathematical proof has "clicked" for you: it's not just about reviewing the logic, but is some kind of deeper knowing that the logic is actually in service to. This strikes me as a glaring omission in the LW flavor of rationality, which AFAICT is almost entirely focused on how to arrange thinking patterns and program metacognition rather than on orienting to thoughts from somewhere else. (It's actually a wonderfully clear fractal reflection of the AI alignment problem, if you view the thought-generator as the AI you're trying to align.) I think this is an essential piece of how a mature Art of Rationality would address the puzzle about limerence you're putting forward.

It gave us capacity for reason, and also it built in a massive hardcoded override for situations where no fuck you your brain is not for building rocketships and new abstract theories, your brain is for producing children and entangling yourself with a partner long enough to raise them. Now focus all your attention on the new prospective mate you are infatuated with.

We have not observed that evolution gave us a massive hardcoded override. My guess at your epistemic state is: You have observed that in certain situations, you're more inclined to have kids and settle down. You have observed that other people claim similar influences on their decision-making. You are inferring there is an override. This inference may or may not be correct, but it is an inference, not an observation!

On a strictly different note, I think it's very implausible that evolution built "massive hardcoded overrides" into humans, and that that implausibility is enormously and neglectedly important to AI alignment, and so it's actually really dang important that we tread correctly in this area.

I'm not sure how the rationality-warping of limerence compares to other major "evolution-hard-coded-some-overrides" areas like "access to power/money/status".

Same complaint.

I've referenced this post several times. I think the post has to balance being a straw vulcan with being unwilling to forcefully say its thesis, and I find Raemon to be surprisingly good at saying true things within that balance. It's also well-written, and a great length. Candidate for my favorite post of the year.

I just want to register that there are things I feel like I couldn't have realistically learned about my partner in an amount of time short enough to precede the event horizon, and that my partner and I have changed each other in ways past the horizon that could be due to limerence but could also just be good old-fashioned positive personal change for reasonable reasons, and that I suspect that the takeaway here is not necessarily to attempt to make final romantic decisions before reaching the horizon, but that you will only be fully informed past the horizon, and that is just the hand that Nature has dealt you. I don't necessarily think you disagree with that but wanted to write that in case you did.

I really like how you used the specific term limerance here instead of something more general. However, I think that it would improve the post to spend a little bit of time discussing what limerance means instead of linking to the Wikipedia page. It's a core part of this post, I suspect a good amount of people don't know what it means, and after a brief skim I found the Wikipedia page to be confusing and not very readable.

I also think the post could be improved by having more concrete examples. I found it to be pretty abstract, which made it hard for me to think about things.

This post demonstrates another surface of the important interplay between our "logical" (really just verbal) part-of-mind and our emotional part-of-mind. Other posts on this site, including by Kaj Sotala and Valentine, go into this interplay and how our rationality is affected by it.

It's important to note, both for ourselves and for our relationships with others, that the emotional part is not something that can be dismissed or fought with, and I think this post does well in explaining an important facet of that. Plus, when we're shown the possible pitfalls ahead of any limerence, we can be more aware of it when we do fall in love, which is always nice.

I think this is just one particular subcase of "strong urges are hard not to follow" (other examples: cravings for food one knows is long-term unhealthy; some instances of procrastination (choosing a short-term fun activity over a long-term beneficial one when you don't endorse that); sexual arousal (separate from romantic feelings); being tired/sleepy when you endorse doing stuff that requires overriding that). It certainly is a notable subcase of that, though. I've sometimes described having crushes as having my utility function hijacked (though in a way I usually endorse - I tend to be pretty aligned across versions of myself on this axis).

Some things don't make sense unless you really experience it. Personally I have no words for the warping effects such emotions have on you. It's comparable to having kids or getting brain injury.

It's a socially acceptable mental disorder.

The only thing is to notice when you are in that state and put very low credence on all positive opinions you have about your Limerent Object. You cannot know to a high confidence anything about them in that state. Give it a few years.

Don't take decisions you can't undo, entangle parts of your life which will be painful to detach later.

But it's a ride worth going on. No point in living life too safely. Have fun but stay safe out there.

It's worse than that. I've been aware of this since I was a teenager, but apparently there's no amount of correction that's enough. These days I try to avoid making decisions that will be affected in either direction by limerance, or pre-commit firmly to a course of action and then trust that even if I want to update the plan, I'm going to regret not doing what I pre-committed to earlier.

Spoilers for the film Ex Machina below.

Ex Machina made this point the critical failure of humanity to contain AGI. It was an original spin, given that Hollywood typically depicts Androids' lack of emotional capacity as their main weak point. However, it made the same mistake as Jurassic Park and all other "evil AGI conquers the planet" films (Terminator, Colossus, War Games) in that no reasonable safety precautions are taken.

Personally, I would like to see (and I'm trying to write) a story where intelligent and capable researchers make significant efforts to contain AGI (and likely still fail).

Yeah lol. Not only do our brains say "no fuck you, you don't get to work on rockets" they say "fuck you, you don't even get to not fall in love with this person who is probably terrible for you in lieu of someone more objectively compatible." Hence the sky high marriage rate despite everyone knowing the divorce rate. 

↑ comment by ponkaloupe · 2022-07-02T00:28:00.223Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Not only do our brains say "no fuck you, you don't get to work on rockets"

getting yourself to somewhere on this curve which is not the far left but also not too far to the right can be unbelievably productive. there’s a certain type of infatuation which drives one to show off their achievements, which in turn requires one to make achievements. building a rocket, and inventiveness in general, is a decently high status thing: you may experience a greater drive to actually do these things during a certain period of infatuation.

Replies from: Raemon, Flavius Justinianus

↑ comment by Raemon · 2022-07-02T00:35:58.292Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I do agree with this. Precarious, tho.

Replies from: pktechgirl

↑ comment by Elizabeth (pktechgirl) · 2022-07-02T02:24:55.219Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

↑ comment by Flavius Justinianus · 2022-07-02T03:14:45.590Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"you may experience a greater drive to actually do these things during a certain period of infatuation."

If it's not logistically incompatible with the real strong feelz, sure. 

could this mean someone's physical appearance could be infohazardous? If I believe that looking at someone will cause my terminal goals to be modified into wanting to be with them by limerence, then I won't do so, because I want to spend my time making cool things and reducing the probability that we all die [LW · GW], and if I suddenly end up caring less about those things and just care about passing on my genes or whatever then that increases the odds that we all die, as well as decreasing the amount of cool things in the world leading up to that point.

Alas, being slightly over the subtly-warped-judgment line is like taking one drink – sure it only impairs your judgment a little, but, the one of the things you might do with slightly impaired judgment is to take another drink. (Or, say, foster more emotional closeness with someone who you wouldn’t endorse eventually having sex with).

This is sort of the situation where you need to erect Shelling fences [LW · GW]