My point is that he's trying to shoehorn the "Love Languages" framework onto that situation, because the model is designed to encourage you to do that - it's the same thing that makes it sell. You shouldn't dismiss that as a coincidence, it's not as simple as divorcing that from the legitimate insights. The framework is designed to be a brain worm.
Here's a question: you like the framework. Have you ever seen a specific relationship be saved by it?
I don't mean this disrespectfully, but your comment is a perfect example of someone falling into the trap I was describing. If someone's using you, they don't love you. They won't love you. It doesn't matter what their "love language" is - giving them the thing they're looking to extract isn't going to help, it's just going to get you exploited.
Plenty of it has a point - so does Cosmo. The problem is that it's a psychological model written primarily to be sold. You're welcome to put your trust in that, but I think that's a mistake, and the way that type of stuff usually hurts people is that the model being peddled cuts off deeper understanding of human relationships.
In my opinion the issue with pop-psych marketing constructs is that there are kernels of truth embedded within a misleading superstructure. They tend to leave you worse off because the structure (which is wrong, incomplete, misleading) is bundled with the kernels of truth. They also usually purport to be rosetta stones. There are exactly five love languages, and humans happen to each speak a different variety of them? Hmmmmm.
Another example: what if someone feels "loved" when they're bought gifts, but that's because they're materialistic, a gold digger? Likewise if someone wants to be touched because they're more interested in sex than a relationship, and they derive validation from your sexual interest. "It's just their Love Language" is technically correct, but it's the wrong lens to apply to those situations.
I'm not talking about the thrill of a new relationship. I would define a feeling of old, secure warmth towards your partner of 50 years as romance, and your satisfaction in a 50-year-old relationship is primarily a function of whether you have that. That's the kind of thing that makes someone happy to take care of their wife for 5 or 10 years as she suffers through alzheimers.
But in any case, romance is absolutely the basis of a relationship, otherwise you could marry your best friend. If you don't have it, you're likely to be dissatisfied. Of course it can wane - but that's also why you work to get it back, because if it goes away for good, your relationship is going to suck.
"The Five Love Languages" is literally trademarked. It's a framework that's designed to sound plausible, like a horoscope. It's not designed to be accurate, it's designed to make you go, "oooooh" and repeat the trademark. "Having relationship issues? Oh, have you heard of the Love Languages®? I read about it the other day..."
If your partner doesn't want to touch you, what's the most likely explanation? That they "don't speak your love language", or that they aren't attracted to you?
Ok, and if you are that partner, but you don't want to lose the relationship, what's an easy response? "I don't want to touch you because I don't find you attractive," or "I'm sorry babe, I do love you, but we just don't speak the same love language"?
The whole thing is very Cosmo. It's designed to sell in the same way as Cosmo.
I think this is true, but it really comes down to: how much do you and your spouse like each other?
If you both like each other, you'll want to give, and the relationship is probably going to feel mutually fulfilling. If it's not mutual, you won't want to give, even if you force yourself, and you'll resent doing things for them.
Honestly I think all these reframings are a way of avoiding the basic fact that the main source of satisfaction in a relationship is just: how much you're romantically into the other person, and how much they return that. Throw trust in too, since that's sort of separate, but that's the meat and potatoes of the dish. Romance is romance, vast majority of relationship dissatisfaction I see comes from a lack of desire from one person.
This is completely untrue. Contrary to popular belief, sitting at a desk is extremely healthy in comparison to manual labour, which destroys your body over time.
Standing all day is also worse for your back than sitting all day. Even being a shop assistant is harder on your body, and particularly your back, than sitting at a desk. (Alternating, i.e. an office job with a sit/stand desk, is best.)
The primary issue is complete lack of inactivity (a large component just being weight gain), which you can combat by exercising outside of the office.
People already have the option to not lay bricks. They don't choose it, because they need money.
I get that everyone is going to say, "well then, UBI" but bear in mind in an automated society, power is disproportionately in the hands of the people who own the machines, and they're unlikely to part with their wealth voluntarily.
I don't really understand this. When I see a small house being built, it will have four or five builders on-site at all times, mostly doing labour (and they're, frankly, extremely slow. It will take months to lay the bricks). If you still need the decisions, can't you cut that down to one, or maybe two? That strikes me as a dramatic reduction in labour cost.
I think there's an argument to be made that neural nets are in some sense a form of compression. The model is a lossy compressed representation of the data. So training a model on copyrighted data is quite direct copyright infringement - you're compressing, then redistributing.
Has this ever been used as an argument in a legal case?
I was responding to the idea that it's better than everywhere else on the internet. That hasn't really been my experience. Discord is better, StackOverflow is better, even Reddit is often better if you're looking at specialist communities.
But to be honest I rarely find pearls here. Even many of the "pearls" in the article are just well-written articulations of stuff that is... kind of obvious. Some are inversions of ordinary wisdom for the sake of inversion. Only some carry new information.
I find the most valuable stuff here tends to be arguments where someone knows their shit but is going against the grain, and that person will usually be flagged into oblivion. But there aren't many places you see someone like that responding in context to the mainstream dogma.
---
Interestingly though, reading through it I explicitly remember a lot of the comments he quoted, e.g. the FedEx Airport one (which was really interesting). It's kind of crazy to think the site is small enough that we're all reading the same good stuff.
My experience of Hacker News comments is not positive. They tend to be very convincing but actually kinda bullshit (or just vacuous), which is arguably a lot worse than communities that are transparent.