Hacker News Reader

Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much to back what I'm about to say, but I feel like these articles are written for and describe younger people.

What's being described here are communication problems due to inexperience rather than the actual "game". This might as well be about chess.

People on their second marriage or single people older than about 35 may not have these complications. They can just tell a few stories about themselves and recognize if they're a match right away without much disagreement. Older people don't "reject" as much as they maintain a varying range of distance with that other person over time. Things run their course and people don't get as heartbroken if at all.

That this social maturity can occur regardless of romantic experience hints at something more complex going on than "love" or mere game theory.

View on HN

That maturity is the result of both experience and luxury that one's base needs are met.

> What's being described here are communication problems due to inexperience rather than the actual "game".

It's only a communication problem in the way that world hunger is a communication problem. For most intents + purposes, it's the actual game.

I watched a video about a holiday event at a huge public-works soup kitchen (?) in India. They interviewed a guy who said:

"Normally we get rice and daal, today we have paneer and (whatever) as well, by the grace of God!"

His attention is on the first-order reality of the food going into his stomach. A more sophisticated/privileged person would abstract up, and say something like

"It's nice to see everyone coming together on this special day"

, trading in the physical reality for a social one.

Sex is the same way, not as immediate as food but still life-or-death in its own way.

Agreed. The Tinder data is probably heavily skewed in a few ways, one of which being age. (Another being bots.)

Another being sex workers. Part of my exit from dating apps was a frustrating number of matches asking for money in some form, some of them offering something in return. (some of them hoping their very existence was sufficient)

Maybe, but what you've described will be 95% scams.

Maybe, hard to say because I never followed up / tried to use their claimed "services".

> I feel like these articles are written for and describe younger people.

I think the opposite is true. I first read Jane Austin as a teenager. I had no concept of the economic environment of the book. I thought meh.

Now that I am retired and re-reading Austin, I view them more in terms of the economic environment. I didn't have this context when I was young, and the books are awesome. In several passages she give a critique of the economic system so sublimely that it passed over my head when I was young.

To me it sounds like you're backing up the post you're rebutting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com