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Comment by akurzon | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you bring up this perspective; I feel that reducing these kinds of subjects to some analogy of market forces ends up being really dehumanizing. Especially with things like loneliness and social interaction, it seems that portraying it as trades and estimates of value will sanitize the subject so much that it stops being helpful.

A similar topic (dating on Tinder becoming a market) was covered pretty well recently by The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/modern-da...

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Does it stop being helpful though? I somewhat understand the idea of "you can't talk about humans like that", but in the end I don't buy it. If it accurately describes the situation and enables you to think about it and get ideas by transferring what we know about other markets/interactions etc, isn't that better than putting human interaction, mental health etc into a corner of "this is so special that we must not think about it in trivial terms"?

Of course, the usefulness depends on how well the market concept fits the situation, but I don't feel like rejecting the idea on principle is helpful. It's similar to the idea of "you can't put a price tag on a human life", when of course we're doing that and we need to do it.

" If it accurately describes the situation and enables you to think about it and get ideas by transferring what we know about other markets/interactions etc, isn't that better than putting human interaction, mental health etc into a corner of "this is so special that we must not think about it in trivial terms"?"

Consider the following: It doesn't accurately describe the situation and that is what people are arguing.

I don't really see that argument, it looks more like "you shouldn't think of humans in those terms".

Not "this doesn't work, look, that model has no predictive power", just "it's not okay to think like that". To me, that's mostly just closing your eyes and wishing really hard that human reality isn't profane and cannot be (roughly) described by (relatively) simple models.

I see similar reactions in discussions about free will (or lack thereof) where some people seem to be insulted by the idea that humans aren't special and fundamentally different from animals, not just (much) smarter versions with opposable thumbs.

If the person you are speaking with don't think about the people in such terms, don't treat them as such and socializes primary with people who don't treat him in such a way, then that person is not closing eyes from anything. His interactions with others are not like you described.

Instead, that person is expressing moral, ethical or emotional base for his own behavior and thinking when he objects with "you shouldn't think of humans in those terms". One does not have to be able to make full fledged philosophical theory about own behavior and behavior of chosen acquaintances in order to know that what you say does not match his experience.

And this is the case where your believes influence your experience and outcomes. And more importantly, the prevalent believe in community you are in heavily influences peoples experience and outcome. Whether you are able to express them neatly or not, whether you are able to perform well in debate or not.

> If the person you are speaking with don't think about the people in such terms, don't treat them as such and socializes primary with people who don't treat him in such a way, then that person is not closing eyes from anything.

My experience is: they don't think about people and their interaction at all. If you ask them why something is happening etc, i.e. get them thinking about it, they'll start to come up with explanations that sound a lot like that.

Which is fine, btw. Nobody has to think about anything if they're happy and doing well, questioning things might change that. If you're in a good place, you don't need to move. But thinking isn't really a choice, and neither are beliefs, mental models and experiences. Blaming those that weren't blessed with an intuitive access to relationships sounds a lot like blaming the poor for not being born rich or telling a depressed person to "just stop being sad".

I admit I may have had the tone of "you shouldn't think of humans on those terms," but I emphasize that the point I wanted to make was precisely that the reductionist economic perspective fails to describe how loneliness works. Friendship (and relationships in general) do not align with this sort of model.

To me, attributing these messy interpersonal connections to markets is somewhat handwave-y; it's an unfalsifiable just-so story to explain the behavior, and I think it does more harm than good to think about it on these terms. Again, I would direct you to the Atlantic article I linked above about Tinder. It makes a stronger case than I could that viewing relationships in this way ends up backfiring.

I don't really see how friendships and relationships in general don't align with that sort of model. Can you reduce them to purely mathematical transaction values? Of course not. Are they totally unlike any other markets where two people "trade" and both feel they get something of value? For voluntary relationships (i.e. it's different for your immediate family than for random people you meet): I don't think so. A market-model-based explanation doesn't deny that there's some non-trivial background, it just seeks to analyze how things happen, and it does an okay job in most cases.

The Atlantic article (which I'm obviously not the target audience for, I find them hard to read with all their side stories and presenting n=1 anecdotes as meaningful) seems to not argue about the idea that they are markets, but rather that we shouldn't consider them as markets when we are engaged in it, i.e. if you're having a good time with A, you shouldn't wonder whether you could have had a slightly better time if you had met with B. Don't treat your friendships as you might buying a cell phone. Even business relationships have shifted in that direction, in my experience, it's a pretty recent thing to "shop around" and switch providers because you might save a few bucks.

That's a different issue though, I don't believe that's happening because economists or sociologists use market-models to analyze relationships. Tinder and the commoditization of dating, like-count-fetishizing etc are not a thing because somebody said "hey, you know how car sales work? we should manage our relationships that way". Rather, it's how humans work on a very low level and these technologies and trends are just exposing that by giving people a way to visibly act on it. This isn't new, and pointing it out doesn't cause it, neither will it vanish if we just don't mention it and pretend it's not real.

"I don't really see how friendships and relationships in general don't align with that sort of model. Can you reduce them to purely mathematical transaction values? Of course not."

This is why you cannot use a mathematical model to model behavior that cannot be mathematically reduced. I'm extremely confused how you can claim there's any accuracy in thinking something as a testable model on something that cannot be tested as a model.

You cannot reduce any decisions on any markets, at some point you're going "huh, I guess free will or the universe or randomness? idk", but that doesn't make the models useless. They can be tested. Take Tinder, make predictions how people behave differently if e.g. you change the gender balance, test it.

My point about "you cannot reduce it" isn't about the model, but about relationships themselves. You can't just go "look, here's the fact sheet" because it's way too complex and we don't know all the variables etc pp, but overall, in larger numbers, you can very much use models to predict general behavior. Not on an individual level, but very much so on a group level. Much like in any market, where you will always have outliers that act totally different than what your models predict, but you'll also have the bulk that behaves the way your model predicts. If they don't, your model isn't good. That's not the case for models looking at relationships as markets though.

What people mean when they say "you can't talk about humans like that" is usually that a.) they don't think it works like that b.) it goes against their personal values when dealing with other people.

And to put in personal observation: the same community and people who tend to talk about about relationships in transnational way, is the community that also constantly deals and writes about loneliness.

The community where people generally think that "this is not ok way to talk about humans", is a community where loneliness is less acute problem. Even if they dont have full fledged philosophy of why it is so and could not win the "who is going to destroy who with arguments" game, it leads them toward strategies and behaviors that make average person less lonely.

> it goes against their personal values when dealing with other people

It's my impression as well that this is the main motive behind those reactions. I don't see why though. It's as if thinking about humans as actors in a model, or thinking about them as meat robots that aren't blessed with free will etc automatically makes you a Bond villain that want's to enslave humanity. I don't see how that follows. Understanding humans better, their behavior, reactions, emotions etc enables you to understand them, help them, make them happy, support them etc.

Re relatedness to loneliness: possibly. My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition. Naturally, they'd think (and write) about what they don't understand.

I don't believe you can turn that around though. Similarly to learning to read a language forces you to read a language (short of closing your eyes or looking away, you cannot escape recognizing and interpreting the characters and words that are in front of you), you can't just say "oh, so because I understand the world to function this way, I'm lonely? Cool, I'll just pick a different mental model of the world".

It is that thinking about humans as meat robots that aren't blessed with free will makes you unable to understand them, help them, make them happy, support them etc.

> My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition.

They are emotional too. Pretty common phenomenon about contemporary people who lean heavily towards intellectualism is that they rationalize and explain away their feelings and emotions based decisions.

What you call being happy with intuition is sometimes taking into account complexities that can not be neatly simplified.

For example, the honest truth is that they did something out of anger, fear, wish to show up, but they will go out of their way to frame action as thought out and logical. Their opinion may be actually subjective, based on sympathies and feelings, but they will spend hours constructing elaborate arguments for why the feeling was actually objective.

This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do.

> This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do.

You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way, and understanding that people do things for reasons other than what they say (or even think themselves), and that those reasons are usually pretty basic enables you to react to their actions and opinions differently.

That's another thing I've noticed: almost everybody starts to think about humans in that way once they start thinking about humans and human behavior. That's similar with the "does human life have a value" idea, where even those that shriek at the thought and claim that you it's immeasurable will usually agree that you should put children (and women) into the life-boats first (which, of course, isn't possible if it's immeasurable). To me, it just looks like they don't want to acknowledge their thoughts and intuitions, like somebody not accepting their personal desires and rationalizing it with increasingly strange explanations instead of just saying "I want ice cream". I don't believe that's a healthy approach.

> You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way

This is simply not true. What I wrote has literally nothing to do with whether humans are special or not.

It is literally you who will flip and frame pretty much any verbal explanation of anything that way.

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