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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

As an authorial technique starting off with a just so story about how marriage came to be that lasts several paragraphs and is obviously not at all how marriage came to be and doesn't even have the excuse of referencing some sort of supernatural source for being wrong might seem interesting but bored me too much to continue.

I'm supposing the rest of it is also wrong and badly argued.

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It is not talking literally about how marriage came to be. It is just laying out a set of incentives that probably play a role in the success of marriage as an institution.

yes I realize it is not literal, but the structure of that part of the text as you progress from two people in love come up with a plan to always stay together ends up a just so story about how marriage was created.

Does it work as a list of incentives for how marriage came to be a successful institution? Well since it structures it as an origin story of marriage that you realize is an origin story of marriage at the same time you realize this is obviously not at all how marriage came to be, no it does not work. And I mean - for how marriage came to be a successful institution even has the phrasing came to be inside it. How do you explain the lasting success of an institution based on a fairy tale of it's creation - well lots of things are explained as fairy tales but not rationally. This document has a style that argues the author believes they are making a rational argument, which grates.

It's frankly idiotic the more I think about it! Which I guess would be ok if it was something you told your 5 year old when they asked hey how did marriage come to be. Fairy tales can be charming and funny, but I think the author thinks they're being clever and serious.

So now I went back to read more just to be sure they didn't deal with the fairy tale aspect better further in, but it was a waste of time.

It's a just-so story.

The term comes from Rudyard Kipling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories

There is no hyphenation.

It's not supposed to explain the _origin_ of marriage, it's supposed to explain the _incentive structure_ of marriage.

It's phrased as an origin story purely for narrative purpose.

Still, the incentive structure of marriage until basically yesterday was "hey, I am publicly announcing this woman is mine and I will brutally kill anybody who tries to seduce or rape her, because that would put me at risk of spending lot of resources on an offspring that's not mine. You can't say you have not been warned. Also, my family of origin and her family of origin now have a shared interest (namely, making this family prosper so that their grankids can flourish) and it's better for everyone if they go along, so let's throw a huge party and keep good vibes" Like, we know that. We don't need wild conjectures about what is the incentive structure of marriage, people have been pretty upfront about it for centuries. And if you really have to chase wild conjectures rather than empirical evidence, the least you can do is not to start from laughably culturally specific assumptions: the idea that a social institution serves to maximize individual happiness, when for most of history (and in most of the world still today) that notion would have been bizarre if not frowned upon, can only lead to wrong conclusions. Again, people across cultures and centuries have been pretty upfront about the fact that the point of marriage was not to help any of the spouses be happy but just to keep society working in an orderly manner, or to help spouses adhere to some transcendent morality. The only thing you can get out of this story is a huge warning about the implicit modus operandi of rationalism: the dangerous idea that you can deduct reality, from first principles summarily chosen from what seems common sense in XXI century America, and that the result of building a huge tower of these frail bases can somehow be substantial.

I agree with your substantive criticism of the article.

> The only thing you can get out of this story is a huge warning about the implicit modus operandi of rationalism: the dangerous idea that you can deduct reality, from first principles summarily chosen from what seems common sense in XXI century America, and that the result of building a huge tower of these frail bases can somehow be substantial.

I don't understand what the point is of commenting about not having read the post. That's not even what it's about.

It's written in the same vein as "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" [1]. (Read it. Then read the Wikipedia article.)

[1] https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...

Surprisingly I did not spring fully conscious and new formed onto the internet a few hours ago and have read things in the past.

I appreciate the recommendation to actually read it; it would have been a mistake to look up the article instead of just reading it. It wasn't long and I got a lot from it that I would have skipped over if not for actually reading it.

> just so story

Thank you, this is the term I was looking for, and indeed, pretty much all of the "plans" the author lays out are "just so stories", untestable and with the implication that they are the true reasons things are as they are.

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