Stats for nerds
1recommend
15mentions
2people
2021–2026years
13% recommend87% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- See what it is like from a women's perspective
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
PG's talk about it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh talking about Net Neutrality. I disagreed with Rush about most things but most of the time I thought Rush had some understanding of the issues he talked about. His opposition to Net Neutrality came across as completely ignorant, he didn't seem to know what it was, he was just against it because the phone company told him to be against it, the same way that my son's trans friend hates J. K. Rowling because somebody told them to.
Unlike PG I can point to specific men and women, some trans, who have been hurt by it. That's a step up in evidence.
I've spent plenty of time looking at conference proceedings, review articles and such in the social sciences. If a literature search turns up a conclusive conclusion about anything it's because somebody wrote one paper and nobody followed it up for 20 years.
- I took lessons in acting based on this method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meisner_technique
and came to realize that there is a commonality between writing and acting. An actor might not need to think about the arc of a whole story but they need to think about how it is advanced in a single scene. Sometimes even in real-life situations I think about "blocking" and other concepts from the stage. (e.g. Look at drama and improvisational acting in general)
Lately I read this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Seduction
which has a lot of fiction and non-fiction references oriented around the technology of love ("Tale of Genji", "Les liaisons dangereuses", "Love and Lust") and works over the stories of very interesting people from various directions.
I have been reading the references, reading the references of those references, and going off in other adventures in reading including recent feminist scholarship such as
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
I think that love is the most popular topic for storytelling and this project has vastly improved my ability to confabulate on the subject.
- If they honestly wanted to help people get together there are a lot of things you could do in terms of mechanism design, but as it is they get paid through monthly subscriptions as opposed to when people pair up so they have the wrong incentives. It doesn’t help that almost all of them, except for Bumble, are owned by the same company, Match Group. There ought to be an antitrust lawsuit!
There is a fundamental problem though that the perception that you have unlimited choice can lead you to never settling down because you always imagine that if you keep looking you’ll find somebody better. Falling in love requires you, for at least a while, believe that that person is absolutely singular and unlike everybody else as Stendhal writes in the classic On Love a.k.a. “Love the one you’re with”
See https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
If I was really going to “do something about it” I’d try to put couples through a structured experience, see
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/14/love-is...
- Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.
- Her worst crackpot idea was the "date-me experiment" where, looking for a long term partner, she got roughly 10⁴ guys to fill out a form, scored them, dated a few from the very top, and decided that they were not keepers.
It goes against everything we know about love. Stendhal, who was no monogamist, wrote that falling in love was a process of "crystallization" in his classic On Love [1] in which case the person you are falling in love with seems absolutely singular [2] If, on the other hand, you are looking at it from the viewpoint of this is a selection process that is a long and wide funnel, you will never feel this person is singular.
Authors like Slater [3] and Illouz [4] agree that the problem with online dating is that, like Aella, you imagine you're selecting people from a vast pool and that you could always find somebody better if you just sampled more -- so you never fall in love.
Aella's popularity is an interesting question, as I've observed her over time my impression of her intelligence and judgement has gone down as she keeps falling into the most obvious traps, but the rationalist movement she's associated with is selected for incredulosity (e.g. making a Harry Potter fanfic a canon work will do that) and there is not a lot of quality information about sex out there. (When my evil twin went looking for answers in the stacks of a big academic library we were convinced that those answers were not there.)
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm
[2] as that state of limerence is a temporary thing nothing stops you from feeling it for different people at different times while still harboring less intense feelings for one or more of them (the point is not mono vs poly but rather Aella is far beyond poly)
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Algorithms-Technology-Meeti...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
- That's kinda unfair to the incel. (Musk has like 12 kids now, doesn't sound like an incel to me!)
If you are neurodivergent and were bullied in elementary school, dating in high school is a retraumatization where nothing seems possible and you might find that when you "grow up" there aren't any places to meet people your own age (e.g. go to a "rock concert" and you just meet boomers)
Feminist scholar Eva Illouz points out that many women chase men they find "easy to love" who have no interest in committing to them because they don't have to
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
meantime a lot of guys who have challenges get bitter and sucked into toxic social movements.
