I completely agree. They've always felt unwieldy and annoying, emphasizing some bit of text from a few paragraphs ago that I had just read and was no longer related to what I'm reading now.
I think I'll try this out, I definitely have a bad habit of opening up multiple tabs of comments at a time. It's pretty much just muscle memory now. And that's a tasteful loading bar. Thanks for sharing!
For anyone interested in a detailed explanation of fructose metabolism (and why it's bad for you), I'd highly recommend these two talks by Robert Lustig on the subject. The first one is about how the body reacts to fructose, and the second video is a follow-up that emphasizes how fructose has contributed to the obesity epidemic in the US and elsewhere.
Does fruit contain as much fructose today as it did 50, 100, 200 years ago? Or have we selectively bread the sweetest fruits to the point where monkeys cannot eat bananas?
Monkeys banned from eating bananas at Devon zoo
Zookeepers say the stereotypical food actually makes monkeys more aggressive, rots their teeth and can lead to diabetes
[...]
Zookeepers said the fruit grown and exported for human consumption have far higher levels of sugar than the ones monkeys would eat in the wild – to the point that it’s bad for their teeth and can lead to diabetes.
> Does fruit contain as much fructose today as it did 50, 100, 200 years ago?
Maybe due to selection of larger, sweeter fruit, yes. But processed food contains various sugar variants, including fructose (think "high fructose corn syrup") so fruit isn't the only (not even the main) source of fructose for many.
Lustig argues that the fiber in fruit is the reason fruit does not cause issues in primates where we strip the fiber by straining or most commonly using hfcs as a sweetener. It’s a good-to-great video and worth the watch though I do not have the background to critique it.
A half cup of Dole canned pineapple is 15g of sugar. Eating a half cup of fresh pineapple is 8g of sugar. Pineapple is higher in sugar that many fruits. A cup of raspberries is 3g of Fructose.
This is a little mixing of apples and oranges but the high fructose we tend to eat are much higher than primates that eat fruit.
Eating the equivalent amount of apples to HFCS is never going to have the same effect. Fiber content and other good stuff will completely remove the effects that you might see fructose isolate.
Raw fruit isn't a problem, not even for humans. Products where "sugar" is replaced by fructose or other, simpler sugar variants is. Various sugar substitutes are added to e.g. canned fruit in "juice" which is mostly some kind of sugar. Which lets marketing say "less sugar" ...
And "high fructose corn syrup" is ... almost pure fructose. Which the human liver can only process a limited amount per day.
Anecdote: a young guy in Freiburg (Germany) got Covid recently and as a result lost his sense of taste afterwards. Now he isn't interested in fast food any more as everything tasty "bland" and can "easily" eat vegetables which he disliked before, even broccoli or Brussels sprouts. Which made him loose more than 50 pounds. Don't get this wrong, it's not an incentive to get Covid, but an example of the effects of abstaining from fast food and soft drinks.
Primates also eat fermented fruits which have enzymes that convert to something more digestible. By going for the cleanest best looking fruits/foods we have decreased the diversity of our gut bacteria which increasing the things people are allergic to.
Food is more properly understood in totality than merely as isolated nutrients. However, it is easier to design scientific studies that focus on isolated nutrients.
Whole fruit contains vitamins, minerals, fiber, and significant amounts of water. Whole fruit contains intact plant cell walls. It's very important to eat intact plant cell walls, but that's difficult to determine from studies of isolated nutrients. Because of the bulkiness caused by water and fiber in whole fruit, it's difficult to eat large amounts. For example, it takes about four oranges to make a glass of orange juice. Most people would not eat four oranges, but most people could easily drink 1 or more glasses of juice.
The wild fruit eaten by primates has less sugar and more fiber compared to fruit cultivated by humans. Human cultivated foods, including plants and livestock, are much richer compared to wild plants and animals, having more fat, sugar, starch, and calories in general, than what could evolve in the absence of pest control.
Humans have evolved quite differently than other primates. We have a rare ability to digest large amounts of starch, a capability shared almost exclusively with rats and pigs. It's difficult to compare our diets.
Primates consume significant amounts of foliage (leaves and such). You probably should too, green leaves are very excellent for your health.
I guess my first thought is: the amount of fructose in fruit is small relative to the amount in, say, a cola. Also, fiber might mitigate the insulin response. Also, we aren't eating fruits found in the wild (which is the relevant ecological context for this discussion). We have selectively bred fruits to be bigger and sweeter.
I wonder if the enzyme uricase has anything to do with it. While reading about gout, I read that uricase is not found in humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons but is found in other primates. Apparently uricase is found in most animals except the above. And somehow uricase is also related to fructose processing.
I was told that most fruits have a comparable amount of fructose and glucose and that eating excess fructose is what causes diseases and autoimmune reactions.
There's no big sugar behind it. You can quite easily see that a bunch of studies are on isolates, the Japanese he mentions eat much less calories and more fructose as a percentage of calories, etc.
There's just too much inaccuracies and outright misrepresentation to fit the narrative
This seems to be a fairly common perspective, and I'll try to take it at face value and respond to it in parts. Sorry if I'm late and you got a bunch of other lengthy responses already.
> For example, a lot of people who have vocally criticized America in the last 5 years as being a fascist country seem to be pretty opposed to liberal values like freedom of speech and nonviolence with many such people either rationalizing left-wing violence (BLM riots as well as general antifa violence) if not outright arguing that political violence and even (capital-R) Revolution is necessary.
One problem I've had with this perspective is that the BLM movement is ongoing and has developed into a more coherent (but still decentralized) organization. According to the The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...):
"Between 24 May and 22 August, ACLED records more than 10,600 demonstration events across the country. Over 10,100 of these — or nearly 95% — involve peaceful protesters. Fewer than 570 — or approximately 5% — involve demonstrators engaging in violence."
I disavow the violence and rioting. The looting and destruction of storefronts is unconscionable. But it doesn't represent the majority of the movement.
As for Antifa, that ends up being a whole conversation unto itself—a poignant one given the main topic of fascism. Antifa exists as an idea more so than a formal movement. It's not something you are, it's something you do. It is a form of counter protest directed at fascists and (particularly in the US) white supremacists. It isn't a club with members that you join. The most publicized actions are violent, but more often there is no violence involved. You can counter-protest a white nationalist rally, but you can also call the hotel they are staying at and warn the management that white nationalists will be frequenting the establishment.
> Many support communism and talk about how great life was in the USSR or how amazing China is, which suggests that they're not just referring to some abstract communism that "hasn't been tried yet", but rather specific instances of communist regimes that tick many (all?) of the 'fascism qualities' boxes.
Funny enough, there's a derisive term for this in progressive circles: "Tankies"
They're an exceptionally fringe group, especially in the US, and I would appreciate some additional evidence for the claim that "many" support the USSR and China. Even for people on the left who explicitly advocate for socialism, they do so in advocacy of social justice and workplace democracy, neither of which is reflected at all in the USSR or China.
> many left-wing Americans seem to have pretty segregationist views on race even if they don't have a "master race" per se (perhaps one could argue that "people of color" is their "master race" in the way that various European identities coalesced into "white" in prior centuries?).
Again, I'd appreciate if you could provide some evidence for your claim of "many" left-wing Americans holding these views. I agree that in the last 20-30 years there has been massive re-segregation of schools in the US, and a significant demographic of Biden voters are the people who live in these very segregated suburbs. However, this issue is a common talking point for progressives in this country. I'd argue they're the only group bringing it up and attempting to address it. As for the "master race" thing, I am not entirely sure how to respond to this. Of course you can find any sort of fringe belief on the internet, but I have never seen any traction for this ideology in any of the progressive movements in the US. I know it has been a talking point when criticizing BLM (e.g. countering with "all lives matter"), but this criticism to me is intentionally misunderstanding the movement. BLM is meant to be aspirational, not exclusionary: Black lives also matter.
Two final notes:
1. You talk about a horseshoe where the fringes of the political spectrum are closer together. This is, in my opinion, an incorrect projection of the political landscape, since it implies a single dimension between right and left. I would encourage you to look at https://www.politicalcompass.org. One could get more complicated about it, but I think the distinction on authoritarian/libertarian and conservative/liberal is important. You can be a right-wing or left-wing authoritarian (e.g. Stalin vs. Hitler) and you can be a left-wing or right-wing libertarian (e.g. Noam Chomsky vs. Robert Nozick).
2. I don't want to dismiss the possibility or danger of left-wing authoritarianism. We have plenty examples of that. I do what to emphasize that fascism in particular is not one of them. It is a specific form of conservative authoritarianism that relies heavily on conservative ideology, specifically the desire for hierarchy. In every political movement we would identify as fascist, progressives and communists were the first group to be attacked as the fascists rose to power.
> One problem I've had with this perspective is that the BLM movement is ongoing and has developed into a more coherent (but still decentralized) organization
Yes, let me be perfectly clear that I'm not arguing that the whole BLM movement is violent. I distinguish carefully and deliberately between peaceful protesters and violent rioters. Certainly the majority was peaceful. Even still, there have been a lot of people who participated in the violence and many more who justified it and rationalized it. I'm not trying to suggest that the majority of the movement practiced or condoned violence; I'm only talking about a particular subset of leftists who practice or condone political violence, including the BLM violence.
> As for Antifa, that ends up being a whole conversation unto itself—a poignant one given the main topic of fascism. Antifa exists as an idea more so than a formal movement. It's not something you are, it's something you do. It is a form of counter protest directed at fascists and (particularly in the US) white supremacists. It isn't a club with members that you join. The most publicized actions are violent, but more often there is no violence involved. You can counter-protest a white nationalist rally, but you can also call the hotel they are staying at and warn the management that white nationalists will be frequenting the establishment.
I do understand that Antifa isn't an organization. I'm saying that the people who identify with Antifa tend to practice or condone violence. Since it's not a formal organization with a formal, agreed upon set of values, there will be exceptions. Suffice it to say, there are many people who identify with the "antifa" moniker who practice and condone violence--these are the people that I had in mind in my original post.
> They're an exceptionally fringe group, especially in the US, and I would appreciate some additional evidence for the claim that "many" support the USSR and China. Even for people on the left who explicitly advocate for socialism, they do so in advocacy of social justice and workplace democracy, neither of which is reflected at all in the USSR or China.
I don't have any quantitative evidence on hand. I see a lot of memes about how America/capitalism is terrible because of toilet paper lines during a pandemic from people with hammer/sickles and roses in their Twitter handle. Recently there's been a meme going around about how aliens in soviet films looked more docile and human while American films depicted scary monsters, suggesting that Americans are inherently xenophobic relative to Soviets (also this thorough rebuttal: https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1361314705550307331). People who deny to various degrees the atrocities that took place in the USSR or China (or who continue to deny or downplay the ongoing oppression in China) or who fail to place them in the context of socialism and communism. Similarly (not quite USSR and China, but same energy) people who wear/praise Guerva or Castro. Maybe there's a possibility that I'm in some weird "tankie" social media bubble, but I don't think that's the case considering that my own views are pretty moderate.
> Again, I'd appreciate if you could provide some evidence for your claim of "many" left-wing Americans holding these views
I don't have quantitative evidence, but people advocate for this stuff all the time, even here on this board. Probably the most extreme example was the recent thread about the SF school board explicitly rejecting a qualified PAC candidate because he was white. That happened, and people in the comments still went to bat for the school board. To be clear, I'm not talking about advocating for segregated communities--at this point, it's mostly segregation in terms of facilities at universities and policies or cultural norms that discriminate on the basis of race. I think these kinds of beliefs are common, especially among the leftists I'm talking about (those who practice and condone violence). In fact, these kinds of views are so prominent that I would be comfortable arguing that they extend generally even to nonviolent BLM protesters and beyond.
> BLM is meant to be aspirational, not exclusionary: Black lives also matter.
That's the marketing, but I don't think that's the "truth on the ground" so to speak. In any case, I'm less interested in that it excludes whites and more interested in that it teaches us to obsess over race, to identify first and foremost with our race rather than our common humanity, etc. I'm also disappointed that the movement is pretty happy to talk about how black Americans are disproportionately killed by police but they refuse to confront questions about violent crime statistics or police encounters (or rather, they will talk about how those things are also manifestations of historical racial oppression, which while true, undermines the original thesis that the disparity in killings is a result of racist police).
> You talk about a horseshoe where the fringes of the political spectrum are closer together. This is, in my opinion, an incorrect projection of the political landscape, since it implies a single dimension between right and left.
Yeah, I agree. Political spectrum analogies are universally crumby. Still, that doesn't address my broader concern about why "fascism" seems to be the only kind of illiberalism that raises our collective alarm. After all, history teaches us that far-left ideologies are every bit as capable of wide-scale suffering and devastation as far-right ideologies. I'm really not here to grind axes or to put down leftists even though I obviously don't agree with them, but rather I want to understand why society (including a great many moderates) are only alarmed by illiberalism when it's labeled "fascism" (and conversely why we tolerate illiberalism in the name of combatting 'fascism'). I guess I'm hoping that someone can provide a plausibly principled answer, because it kind of feels like we're trading the liberal foundation of our society for some short term political expedience or catharsis, and that's deeply depressing.
> I don't want to dismiss the possibility or danger of left-wing authoritarianism. We have plenty examples of that. I do what to emphasize that fascism in particular is not one of them. It is a specific form of conservative authoritarianism that relies heavily on conservative ideology, specifically the desire for hierarchy. In every political movement we would identify as fascist, progressives and communists were the first group to be attacked as the fascists rose to power.
So it sounds like you and I agree that left authoritarianism is just as abominable as right authoritarianism, but perhaps you don't think that left-wing illiberalism is prominent? I do agree that fascism is a right-wing ideology; my question was more "why do we seem very alarmed by 'fascism' in particular but not left-wing authoritarianism". From the sounds of it, you think fascism is the more proximate threat?
> I'm saying that the people who identify with Antifa tend to practice or condone violence
Who have you spoken to who is like this? I identify as an antifascist. I've never thrown a brick or punched a person. Virtually all of my antifascist action involves holding signs or calling businesses. This is true for basically everybody I've ever interacted with who considers themselves an antifascist.
But you were. You made a claim about the large majority of anti fascists. And I’d like to know which ones you’ve interacted with and where because it doesn’t match my experience as an anti fascist.
Mostly folks in Oregon and Chicago and elsewhere online. I'm not going to give you their names on the Internet when I'm not willing to give you my own name. Many weren't violent themselves but were condoning or praising those who were. They liken "anti-fascist" violence to allied forces at D-Day.
I'm sure you can argue if you like that these aren't a majority of antifa. Fine, I don't care, and my point doesn't hinge on that detail. Do you have anything substantial to add, or are you just here to nitpick minutia?
> I want to understand why society (including a great many moderates) are only alarmed by illiberalism when it's labeled "fascism" (and conversely why we tolerate illiberalism in the name of combatting 'fascism').
I suppose it's a matter of perspective. I don't know how much the sympathies for authoritarian regimes and the calls to violence on twitter would translate to people taking action. The calls for revolution just seem like role-play to me. I just don't hear this sort of rhetoric being voiced by people actually doing the work of advancing progressive political causes. Maybe it's easier for me to dismiss the illiberalism on the left because I genuinely am not exposed to that much of it.
> it kind of feels like we're trading the liberal foundation of our society for some short term political expedience or catharsis, and that's deeply depressing.
I feel the same way about the behavior of the right in recent months.
> From the sounds of it, you think fascism is the more proximate threat?
Yeah pretty much. I believe fascism is gaining political traction. I'm concerned about the increasing militancy of white nationalist groups and the significant number of people in the US who think the election was stolen.
> The calls for revolution just seem like role-play to me. I just don't hear this sort of rhetoric being voiced by people actually doing the work of advancing progressive political causes.
That’s sort of how I felt as well before the BLM riots and various antifa violence (no, not all antifa or BLM protesters are violent). To be honest I think I’m more concerned about the people who implicitly or explicitly condoned the violence than the violence itself. Indeed, I think that suggested to the Capitol Hill rioters that political violence was no longer out-of-bounds; rather, it was legitimate and necessary.
> Maybe it's easier for me to dismiss the illiberalism on the left because I genuinely am not exposed to that much of it.
I am sympathetic to this. With cable news and now social media we’re all being “bubbled” according to what Twitter et al thinks will keep us most engaged, and it’s hard to know how skewed our information stream really is. I’m certainly concerned about my own bubble, and I try to limit the threat of bias by subscribing to a diverse stream of content rather than letting the likes of Twitter curate for me.
> I feel the same way about the behavior of the right in recent months.
I agree. I think the right followed the left’s lead after the media, the academy, silicon valley, Hollywood, and virtually every other prominent cultural institution either condoned or ignored the violence over the summer. It often feels like the left makes/changes the rules and the right reacts/follows suit—with respect to moral relativism, epistemological relativism, in civility, and most recently political violence. I think it’s this perception that the left “leads” the cycle (by way of dominance over the aforementioned influential institutions) that draws my criticism leftward (although I take care to avoid being unduly lenient to the right).
> Yeah pretty much. I believe fascism is gaining political traction. I'm concerned about the increasing militancy of white nationalist groups and the significant number of people in the US who think the election was stolen.
I sympathize and to an extent I agree. The critical difference I think is that I see the rise of the extreme right as a direct consequence of the rise of the extreme left. I don’t think we’ll have much success re-marginalizing the right so long as we continue to condone and tolerate bad behavior on the left. I think we need to reestablish non-partisan norms of honesty, civility, and non-violence and consistently enforce breaches of those ethics whether from the right or the left. I think our double-standard is a powerful driver of the radicalization of the right, and until we correct it, I fear socially censuring the right will only fuel their persecution narrative and bolster their ranks. This is a long-winded way of saying that reigning in the far left feels like a prerequisite to reigning in the far-right. Of course, I remain vigilant to the possibility that I’m wrong.
>The critical difference I think is that I see the rise of the extreme right as a direct consequence of the rise of the extreme left.
The rise of the extreme right arguably began with the Tea Party, or possibly as a reaction to 9/11. What leftist extremism would either have been a direct consequence of?
I see the opposite - Antifa only became a thing as a reaction to the perceived extremism of Trump's base. BLM came about as a reaction to violence by the police (which as an institution is overwhelmingly right-wing.) Right-wing extremism then surged as a counter-reaction to that.
Even Trump's election, itself, was a right-wing populist reaction not to any kind of leftist extremism but to the status quo, and the existence of the left in general.
> The rise of the extreme right arguably began with the Tea Party, or possibly as a reaction to 9/11 ... Even Trump's election, itself, was a right-wing populist reaction not to any kind of leftist extremism but to the status quo, and the existence of the left in general.
I dispute this. The Tea Party and early 2000s conservatives weren't "extreme right", they were moderate, largely civil (if only because they were late adopters of the Internet), non-violent, and roughly "liberal" in the sense that they were more-or-less on-board with the liberalism contract (individual rights, settle conflicts non-violently, due process, freedom of speech, etc). There was always a fringe far-right element, but they were successfully marginalized. The idea that Trumpism was a reaction to the existence of the left doesn't make a lot of sense--the left has always existed and yet Trumpism didn't catalyze until ~2015.
That said, I suspect you disagree with this characterization, and that's fine. I don't think either of us can prove our positions, so perhaps we can agree on this much: liberalism is worth defending, and we should condemn illiberalism whether from the right or the left, irrespective of who cast the first stone?
>so perhaps we can agree on this much: liberalism is worth defending, and we should condemn illiberalism whether from the right or the left, irrespective of who cast the first stone?
> I think that suggested to the Capitol Hill rioters that political violence was no longer out-of-bounds; rather, it was legitimate and necessary.
I hadn't thought of that. I could definitely see it playing a role, especially since there was likely a much larger emphasis on the violence of the protests within their bubble. It probably imprinted stronger than it would have on anyone with less partisan sources.
I would like to draw a line here, though. The rioters at the capitol did not turn violent because they were primed by BLM or Antifa. They turned violent because they were fed a warped image of the protest movement, an image that demonized the left so thoroughly that they came to view them as (sometimes literally) devils seeking to undermine the fabric of American democracy.
> the media, the academy, silicon valley, Hollywood, and virtually every other prominent cultural institution either condoned or ignored the violence over the summer
This is definitely something I'm concerned about. The whole thing is suspicious to me as well because none of these institutions have much interest in actually aiding the movements they claim to support. Swapping your profile picture to a black square isn't support. It's just a cynical performative wokeness. They are not really allies to these causes, and have no interest in improving conditions for people in a way that would make the protests unnecessary.
> I think we need to reestablish non-partisan norms of honesty, civility, and non-violence and consistently enforce breaches of those ethics whether from the right or the left.
agreed.
> This is a long-winded way of saying that reigning in the far left feels like a prerequisite to reigning in the far-right.
I have the exact opposite view. I disagree with the perspective that we were in a well-oriented, moderate position on liberal democracy that is now being torn apart by equally radical right-wing and left-wing movements. The political trend in this country over the last 40 years has been more appeasement to right-wing policies, more corporate favoritism, and a weakening of social institutions (i.e. neoliberalism). People like Bernie Sanders advocate for policies that do not raise an eyebrow in any other developed country, yet he is vilified by supposedly centrist news sources (though I suppose it's relaxed now that he isn't threatening to run for president anymore). If we had a legitimate left-wing party advocating for policies that helped people climb out of their collective pits of despair, the BLM protests would never have happened, and the far right would never have had such ease in their recruiting efforts.
My perspective is that the progressive movement has answers to deal with the violence on both sides. The people on the far-right turn to these proto-fascist movements because they are desperate for change, any kind of change. The system is not working for them and they wish to return to some mythologized past where they could still have dignity and hope for the future. Many of the people who voted enthusiastically for Trump in 2020 knew he wouldn't fulfill many (any?) of his promises, but they felt that he saw them. He recognized that they exist, and he spoke to them directly and at their level. I believe the violent protesters and belligerent twitter users that you mentioned are also frustrated by the disintegration of the American dream. They're upset, they abandoned, and their solution is a rejection of the system.
In a way, I think we want the same thing. We cannot sustain our democracy while demonizing each other. But to me it seems you want to emphasize on improving the discourse. I think the discourse improves itself when the material conditions of people's lives are improved. I don't mean to imply we must choose to focus on one thing or the other, but that the latter choice will be more effective.
Thank you for sharing that essay, it was very insightful!
I can see a lot of the parallels there. Precarity and "social cooling" are two very similar perspectives on the consequences of surveillance capitalism. It's still difficult to sell the idea that there is a systemic underpinning for feelings and experiences that, for most people, will only be interpreted as exclusively personal.
Honestly I wasn't aware that Google Play Music was still around until I got an email telling me it would discontinued. I've been using YouTube Music since I signed up for YouTube Premium a few years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.
>This is a pretty big assertion that the piece casually drops without backing
My understanding was that the results of the author's interviews were the backing for this assertion:
>As the interviews made clear, people adopted the biogenetic account because they thought it was based in science. The interviews also show how this account undermines the kinds of introspection and self-examination that can lead to meaningful self-knowledge.
>Mental health treatment needs to re-engage with the language of persons. This means suspending the detached, third-person stance toward patients, and attending to their actual experience and circumstances. And it means encouraging patients themselves to avoid this stance and draw on the normal ways that people make sense of their emotions and actions.
Or do you mean that the conclusion the author reaches, that we should be attending to people's experiences instead of using "biogenetic causal language," isn't justified by the results of the interviews?
> I also tend to recommend his university course lectures over his public-directed material; I'm not sure why it seems more moderated, but I'd guess that professional accountability and contextual habits developed before fame have something to do with it.
I've noticed the same thing. I think he's gotten into bad habits commenting on subjects outside of his area of expertise, but I did enjoy his YouTube lectures for the reasons you mentioned
Whilst we're speaking philosophy... I think Pliny's "sutor, ne ultra crepidam" ("shoemaker, not beyond the shoe") might be the quip to match your comment.
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.
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.
