Comment by sudoscript | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudoscript | Hacker News Reader

>> There’s an association that still lingers between a “community” and a physical location — the idyllic small town, say, or the utopian village, real or imagined. It evokes a cozy, friendly, simple place in which people live in easy harmony and cooperation, each with a role to play, each mattering to the whole.

>> “Community” makes everything sound better. It makes “the activist community” sound approachable; it makes “the skin-care community” sound important; it makes “the Christian community” sound inclusive and kind; it makes “the medical community” sound folksy and skilled at the bedside; it makes “the homeless community” sound voluntary; it makes “the gun rights community” sound humanistic; it makes “the tech community” sound like good citizens.

All these "communities" that we're told we're part of all the time are really just labels. Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have. They exist, but are much fewer and far in between than everyone uses the word for.

> Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have

There is a tradeoff between freedom and community.

Organic bonds with real feeling come from a true alignment in interests. One of the simplest ways of creating interest alignment is making sure everyone has a long-term commitment. But the flip side of 'commitment' is that people can't be free to leave whenever they want.

A highly mobile society where everyone is largely free to join or leave any virtual community, neighborhood, is one where nobody feels any form of permanent attachment to that institution or to their fellow community members, because there is no long-term commitment, either from themselves, or from their fellow members. A neighborhood where everyone has the ability to freely come and go is one where nobody has a strong incentive to sacrifice for their neighbors, because who knows who your neighbors will be tomorrow, or whether you will still be there?

You can see one aspect with the rise of no-fault divorce; in the past, perhaps many people were trapped in unhappy marriages, but by the same token, the lifelong commitment may have encouraged many couples figure out ways to make it work. Nowadays, it is no longer possible for both members to bind themselves to one another. And since both partners can walk out at any time (and both people know it), why go to extraordinary lengths to make it work?

It's easy to make a marriage work when you know that both of you are in it voluntarily. Most people who get married don't get divorced.

Divorce rate is 53% in the US, and higher in many countries. So only a minority of people whi marry don’t get divorced.

That statistic allows you to say only a minority of marriages don't end in divorce.

People can be married multiple times so it cannot be true that most married people experience divorce unless they rarely remarry.

I've seen 41% of first marriages end in divorce.

> Divorce rate is 53% in the US

It depends on what you measure and how you measure it. Which exact measurement are you doing?

For example, based on table 5 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor... at age 45 56.3% (48.6/(1-.137)) of people who got married at all are still in their first marriage. The other 43.7% got divorced.

Some of those people remarried. Of people who married at least twice, 41.4% are in their second marriage. The other 58.6% got divorced. Note that this is much higher than the first-marriage divorce rate.

The upshot is that many measurements of divorce rates (again, depending on what you measure) are highly affected by people who get married and divorced multiple times. People who can't make one marriage work are much more likely to also not make another one work... The divorce rate for first marriages is not over 50% in any data set I've seen for the US. If you have a citation for it being higher than that, I'd love to see it.

Divorce rate is actually calculated by the number of divorces each year divided by the number of marriages each year. So if married couples flipped a coin each year to decide whether to get divorced, we'd have a similar divorce rate but almost no one would stay married for life.

On the other hand, if 90% of married couples stayed married for life but the remaining 10% got married and divorced 10 times each, we'd also have about a 53% divorce rate.

So the 53% number could support almost everyone getting divorces or almost everyone staying with their first marriage for life. It's a bit hard to measure this statistic, but every source I found says that a majority of Americans who get married never divorce.

Even if it were only 47%, that's still a really high success rate. We're talking about people in their 20s and 30s making a commitment that lasts until they're 80 or so. That doesn't support the idea that our society no longer has long-term commitments.

>> Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have

> There is a tradeoff between freedom and community.

I think you misunderstood the comment. People who "like" a particular cat photo page likely don't think of themselves as being part of a _community_ but FB uses the term to try to con them.

I'll cop to taking the topic off onto a tangent, although you can see FB's appropriation of the term 'community' (likewise 'friend', 'like') as indicative of the general cheapening of what these very important words and their meanings.

Not the full picture.

You can have self selected individuals working on an interest who integrate and form a community.

My favorite example is the bay12forum for Dwarf fortress.

High barriers to entry, you need to actually be highly engaged to get over the interface - means that entrants to the forum (used to) stick around and get to know each other.

What you are seeing is the difficulty of paying matching costs for complex types of matches.

In the old system you didn't have options, so shopping around didn't make sense.

In the new system you do have options, so shopping around becomes more attractive.

Or maybe since the partner can just walk out, you have to try harder. Afaik, domestic violence is down. The partner "cant walk out" works great when you are aggressor, because it forces target to stay no matter how bad you treat them. It works less well for the one that is treated badly. Trying harder wont help you if the other person is bullying you. The "people tried harder to keep it together" interpretation ignores that the trying harder part was unevenly distributed.

It does not even have to be about big things like abuse. If one spouse cease caring about relationship, the other one can work as much as he/she wants, but it will do nothing. Because it takes two.

The employer/employee power dynamic can be like this too.

People are happier in a job when they have the freedom to walk away from it (and still afford to live). Typically this is because they have skills and experience that are in demand, so they can easily find another job to pay rent.

Unskilled workers don't have this freedom because they need their boss more than their boss needs them. Hence unions are necessary.

Universal basic income would give this freedom to everyone.

universal basic income would also forcibly extract money from those who have money to support those who choose not to work for no reason other than sheer sloth. The ultra wealthy are very mobile and can move their money at will, unless the government somehow gains the will to confiscate private assets for the good of the collective, but what would that say about a society willing to do that?

The solution is to instead tax the means of capital, or collective ownership similar to a B Corp. That way if jobs are replaced through mechanization the cost of the job loss is incurred by the company directly profiting from replacing a human being.

I completely agree that in the US there is a massive power imbalance that exists due to regulatory capture and oligarch rule, but UBI isn't the silver bullet everyone seems to think it is.

> There is a tradeoff between freedom and community.

This largely depends on the conception of freedom in question. If freedom implies that individuals as a result of a the proliferation of human rights are able to live atomistic lives without much interaction with most anyone else than the state and their employers, then I agree. The last ~100 years is empirical evidence of this.

If, however, freedom implies that beyond a few obligations and non-intrusive rights (e.g. a right to free speech doesnt impose on anyone else, whereas a right to education or health care does), then freedom and community are correlated goods. We can see the evidence of this in the 19th century. Alexis de Tocqueville for instance wrote extensively about how in America, people organically formed their own communities in the absence of de jure social classes (beyond citizen and slave, which he found grotesque), and that this was a unique aspect of the relative freedom found in America at the time.

All of this is to say that the conception of freedom dictates the cohesion and veracity and quantity of organic communities. Or, perhaps stated another way, there is a trade-off between organic community and both inclusion and state intervention in private arrangements.

> there is a trade-off between organic community and both inclusion and state intervention in private arrangements.

I think this line becomes heavily blurred in a democratic society where laws are authentic expressions of people's preference for how their society should be ordered. The laws surrounding marriage being the obvious prototype.

You can see the proposals to abolish marriage in the wake of the French Revolution as a recognition it is the ultimate intrusion of the state (and Church) into deeply private affairs, but one which we as a society tolerate due to long practice and because we ultimate recognize that the necessary freedom to enter into a binding commitment is more valuable than, say, the freedom to be able to change your mind at any time (modern, unilateral no-fault divorce notwithstanding).

I agree that the way freedom is defined strongly matters and I attacked a bit of a strawman, but one that represents a trend. A naive conception of freedom, where all rules, traditions, and authorities are seen as inherently limiting, ultimately leads to normlessness and anomie.

I'd say that what many modern societies lack are meaningful commitments, freely entered (strong, cohesive communities being one aspect).

> There is a tradeoff between freedom and community. It does in the real world. That doesn't have to be that way online.

>And since both partners can walk out at any time (and both people know it), why go to extraordinary lengths to make it work?

For the well being of the kids of course.

So, most communities are granfalloons. Yeah, I can buy that.

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