Pods and Ends 2

Three podcast appearances, and a teaser about rationalism vs. dating

Second Person is celebrating six months with another roundup of podcast appearances. These are all broadly about my thoughts on dating, though none of these podcast has dating as its main subject matter. As a result, each conversation addressed different topics through different lenses and with a different mood. Of course, all are equally self-recommending.

Programming note: I am traveling to Israel soon and so Second Person will publish on Mondays instead of Fridays for the duration of April. I apologize if this messes up your Saturday morning routine — you can just wait to read the podcast transcripts instead!

The Bayesian Conspiracy with Eneasz Brodski and Steven Zuber / Making Dating not Suck

Appropriately for the longest-running rationalist podcast, we discussed a rationalist approach to dating, including a lot of posts from my old rationalist blog. Subjects include: my journey from antirationality (business school) to rationalism, human specialness and excellence, consent culture vs. selflessness, signaling theory, and steelmanning monogamy. We both note the many irrationalities in people’s approaches to dating, though we react to these quite differently.

Eudaimoniaq with Salvador / Unraveling the Game of Love and Dating

While Eneasz represents the mood of rationality, with Salvador we explicitly discussed dating through a hard rationalist lens: partner search as a coordination and selection problem, active inference, applying Bayes and risk/reward calculations to relationships. And naturally, we discussed the limitations of all these calculations for trying to make sense of and improve your dating life.

Subversive with Alex Kaschuta / Men, Women, and Other Aliens

This was a real honor, as I’ve been a fan of Alex’s podcast since it launched many years ago. Our conversation touched on a lot of ways we both have changed throughout that time: navigating politics and culture wars through vibe shifts and vibe crashes, separating the intimate from the online, and becoming parents. A central theme of our conversation is the inadequacy of totalizing worldviews in informing people’s personal lives, helping them understand the opposite sex, and building relationships.

Together, the three podcasts are an excellent lead-in to my next topic: why does rationalism struggle so much with dating? Rationalist writers, for all the curiosity about human nature, mostly avoid it. Rationalist readers, for all their interest in reading about it, often misunderstand it.

I think it has to do with all the topics we touched on in the podcast: the inclination to decouple and calculate, the separation of action from learning, the frustration with irrationality, and the desire for a single clean framework to give you all the answers. I hope the extra three-days’ wait will be worth it, and that the podcasts keep you well entertained in the meantime.