Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

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Your post and my post are both full of hypotheticals, so let's stick to the core empirical claim that could prove you're more correct:

> the activities you cite are so far faring badly. Putnam and Murray (Bowling Alone/Coming Apart)...

There are two problems with Bowling Alone.

1. Bowling is boring; I'd rather grab a cappucino.

Putnam and Murray suppose that the social institutions and conventions of 1910-1940 were a platonic ideal and therefore ignore the myriad of new ways that people socialize and engage in their communities.

To pick just one relevant example, hackerspaces only existed in a few major cities when I became interested in them 10-15 years ago. Now there's at least one in every major city as well as many in smaller communities. But hackerspaces are just an example; there are thousands of other examples of the same phenomenon: popular and thriving community forums that didn't even exist in 1910-1940.

This form of community engagement is the sort of thing that Putnam and Murray completely miss in their analysis because, for them, "community engagement" means regular contact with one of ten or so institutions they happened to have statistics for when they wrote their book.

I spend less time at church potlucks and bowling nights than my grandparents. But then, my grandparents never met friends at coffee shops or hung out at hackerspaces.

2. Far more damning, Putnam and Murray weren't even correct for the tiny subset of community engagement metrics they chose to form their best-selling "darn kids born after 1940" thesis. See e.g., Everett Lad's critique of Bowling Alone.

So not only did new forms of community engagement pop up in response to changing times and interests, but traditional forms of community engagement continued to thrive!

I agree with your contention that the examples of modern annoyances chosen by the author are not hidden pinnacles of humanness to be preserved at all costs.

However, I think the author's deeper point still stands, despite his poor support for the argument.

Can we not agree that the _je ne sais quoi_ of humanness is threatened, on some level, by modernity?

It is a very difficult empirical case to make, as you have made clear with your totally acceptable critique of _Bowling Alone_.

But, in my view, supporting the claim that our "humanness" is under assault is not really where we should be focusing our energies here... It is much more interesting to discuss how we can preserve the "old good" things from our past, while somehow enabling ourselves to take advantage of the "new good" things unlocked by technological progress without being undone in the process.

I'm tired of all these jeremiads bewailing the loss of all that we hold dear, ripped from our grasp by inhuman techno-corporate-behemoths.

Not sure what the roadmap for a more productive discussion is--but perhaps first we must define exactly what it is we valued from our pre-industrial, supposedly unsullied past.

I agree with you that we must be very critical any rose-tinted "back in my day it was better" line of inquiry, but I do believe that there are things worth preserving. Another important question to answer is, why are those things valuable to us? Is it because they titillate our neurons in just the right way? Or is there something more there?

Then we need to figure out how to implement our technological progress in a way that fosters these values, rather than undermining them.

PS: above-mentioned link to Ladd's critique of _Bowling Alone_: https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0301/p9s1.html

The book addresses some of those points. Individual volunteering may be up, for example, but not forms of volunteering that are more community based. Charitable donations require no cooperation with other members of the community, so it is irrelevant.

> but I do believe that there are things worth preserving. Another important question to answer is, why are those things valuable to us? Is it because they titillate our neurons in just the right way? Or is there something more there?

The article discusses the fact that there are things beyond happiness that are important to humanity/humans. The author mentions self-determinism ("...a dystopian nightmare wherein humans are reduced to automatons") as well as seredipity and randomness ("...value of searching, browsing, being bored, being lost, failing, missing out, daydreaming, being surprised, going off script...")

My own opinion is that a liberal mindset of the form Wallace discusses in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water is important.

If we leave human rights in-tact and preserve the 40 hour work week (or less), there's no shortage of personal freedom, serendipity, randomness, and wonder to be found in this world. But if these things do not happen naturally, then we'll need to teach them.

> Putnam and Murray suppose that the social institutions and conventions of 1910-1940 were a platonic ideal and therefore ignore the myriad of new ways that people socialize and engage in their communities.

Are the new ways the same though? Not all social experiences are equal.

I'd say bowling offers a much richer social experience than getting coffee or going to a hacker space. There is direct competition, there is teamwork, commitment and the comradery that comes with it, there are winner and losers, good days and bad days, etc. With bowling or church you will also be interacting with a much wider range of the community, it's a much less self selecting group.

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