me: shows this bit from an ACX post to the giant
I thought about this recently when watching a great couple who loved each other very much. The wife said some kind of extremely mushy compliment to the husband about how much she loved him, and the husband joked something like “Oh, you always say that.” He maybe mildly appreciated the compliment, but they really were always saying incredibly nice things about how much they appreciated each other, to the point where it kind of started to sound kind of like background noise.
Suppose you reached the point where it sounded exactly like background noise. Your spouse could give you a dozen red roses and a sonnet about your many excellent qualities every day, and it wouldn’t update you at all. At that point, you either need to have the mysterious “companionate love” thing in place – something that isn’t based on reward prediction error – or you are doomed to never feel another positive emotion from your relationship at all.
the giant, who is constantly being high-intensity nice at me: Yeeaahh. I’ve thought about this. But… it’s so hard to NOT tell you how much I love you every time I see you.
me, in complete sincerity: So the problem is that the reward needs to be unpredictable, right? Here’s what I suggest – you keep a digital die roll website open in a pinned tab, roll it every time I come into the room, and –
the giant: No!!
me: [stricken by the irrationality of human beings]
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with loopholes #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 