[blindhippo]

Yikes, that's quite the binary distinction... Surely there is room between those subjective descriptions of people for "hey, I like this thing even though it's irrational, ok?"

Let people live their lives and you do you. People aren't a "provider mannequin" just because they like to make their partner happy.

[serf]

acknowledgement of irrationality, especially one that isn't accompanied with a wish to better themselves away from that irrationality, would be a major red flag for me personally entering into a long-term relationship.

there is also a great distinction between "Yeah I know another helping of chocolate syrup on my ice cream is a bad decision, but it'll make me feel good today.", and "You need to make a 10kUSD+ purchase on a totally arbitrary piece of jewelry that very well may have incited real human suffering and violence, even though I know that desire is irrational and poorly balanced."

I would assume -- maybe incorrectly, I admit -- that this form of irrationality would follow the individual and subsequently the entire relationship.

We all have different 'red flag dictionaries', so by all means people should live their lives; but I doubt I am alone in my assumptions.

[TeMPOraL]

> "You need to make a 10kUSD+ purchase on a totally arbitrary piece of jewelry that very well may have incited real human suffering and violence, even though I know that desire is irrational and poorly balanced."

That's a tricky topic to broach. Drop one zero from the price tag, and this definitely applies much more to your smartphone and computer than it does to gems. Drop one or two more zeroes, and this covers the clothes you wear just as much.

I'm not denying you have a point here. The suffering and violence are real. But my wife and I both went down the road of paying attention to that, and we've learned one has only so much attention to pay before you can hardly purchase anything at all. Nearly everyone has a cut-off point, past which they stop digging into those issues, otherwise it becomes debilitating.

Call this irrational, but the amount of personal responsibility one should feel for some injustice they benefit from, among with a billion or two other people, is an unsolved philosophical and ethical problem.

Or, my point in short: cut people some slack.

[IanCal]

Part of the comparison here is that the alternatives are both cheaper and practically better. So it doesn't apply so much unless you chose to buy, say, clothes from brand A that were indistinguishable from brand B to normal people but cost more and involved more child labour. Or if apple made a special phone you could buy that looked the same but cost 10x as much because it also includes payments to warlords.

> Call this irrational, but the amount of personal responsibility one should feel for some injustice they benefit from, among with a billion or two other people, is an unsolved philosophical and ethical problem.

I don't think it's unsolved, it's just unsolved in a way that makes people feel ok. The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.

[TeMPOraL]

> Part of the comparison here is that the alternatives are both cheaper and practically better.

It's not the case here, because you're not buying gems for their practical value. If you were, then there would not be an issue - lab-grown diamonds for cutting things would be even cheaper than they are, and you wouldn't care about other gems unless you were playing with lasers or something.

As much a I hate it, the entire point of jewelry is that it's expensive and useless. It's the OG "proof of work" kind of thing - you prove your affection by burning significant resources on some piece of junk, and the recipient can use that piece of junk to prove their status to others ("look how much wealth I can burn on stupid shit", or "look how much wealth I can get someone else to burn on my behalf"). Layer a millennium of traditions and a century of De Beers marketing on top, and we get to where we are.

Being practical devalues jewelry; being cheap is opposite of its point; being alternative means being unauthentic, and makes the wearer a liar.

> The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.

That's the unsolved part. For any given thing enjoyed by me and a billion other people, with hardly anyone talking it's wrong, I suddenly have to take some stranger's accusations and/or guilt-tripping at face value. The math goes like this:

- Surely my responsibility can't be more than one-billionth of the whole thing;

- It's not like I can actually make a difference without upending my whole life. That doesn't feel commensurate with one billionth of whatever the bad thing is;

("Voting with your wallet" is bullshit; boycotts don't work; you can't really make a dent without a large movement here, and good luck creating one over random consumer decision - you're competing with efforts to start a movement over ever other such decision, and people's attention is finite.)

- You came out of nowhere and started guilt-tripping me, it's not just inconvenient and makes me feel bad, but it's also a technique used by scammers and cultists and politicians - so why should I trust your math in the first place?

With a little hand-waving, the solution to above inequality is "I'm not going to change, and I don't like you anymore".

I'm not saying this is good - just that it is. That's the bit that's unsolved in practice.

[ako]

Jewelry is not unpractical, it's like an insurance for bad times. When shit hits the fan you still have your jewelry to sell.

[ben_w]

That used to be true, but now, and specifically with diamonds, not so much: https://www.brightonsavoy.com.au/why-does-a-diamond-have-no-....

[coryfklein]

I mean, sort of? The median woman who wants the gorgeous diamond ring from her husband is NOT thinking “This will be great insurance in case we become destitute”. Because everyone knows the resell value is terrible! Worst return on an insurance policy ever.

They want them because they are pretty and because – like it or not – it’s what society has taught them to expect.

[20after4]

Unfortunately, the diamond doesn't fetch much when you go to sell it.

You'll get the value of the gold in the ring but not much for the gemstone.

[meiraleal]

In this case the ex-poor wifes bought by rich men will have a jewelry to sell in the case of a breakup

[meiraleal]

> Or, my point in short: cut people some slack

That's what we are doing here! But in this case most people seems to be sympathetic to the people that suffered to get you and your wife a diamond? I don't think rich people with frivolous desires need any more "empathy"

[TeMPOraL]

Diamonds aren't rich people game, they're middle-class and above game. Hell, probably even below. That's what makes the arguments about being associated[0] with violence fall on deaf ears - approximately everyone in the west is participating. Not the Evil Bad No Good Rich One-Percenters. It's all the 90-percenters.

--

[0] - It's always "some of them", "could be". The industry has blood on its hand. The particular rock you might buy your wife? Unclear. It's not like with e.g. tantalum capacitors which, at some point, AFAIK were all made out of tantalum sourced from child slavery mines in Africa. I honestly don't know if "some" diamonds are more like 50% or 5% or 0.5%.

[meiraleal]

> The particular rock you might buy your wife? Unclear

Not unclear: as the not-blood diamond is more expensive, buying it is morally the same as buying the blood one. Now that is similar with many things that is produced and sold around the world, the problem with diamonds (and other luxury goods) is that we definitely could have a better society without it. It is not the same as giving up on iphones (which also shouldn't be produced by kids or starving people btw)

[yencabulator]

> with violence fall on deaf ears - approximately everyone in the west is participating

That's no excuse to continue.

[InSteady]

>...before you can hardly purchase anything at all.

In terms of living a more ethical life (on several different levels), this is a crude but generally effective way to go about it.

[skywhopper]

If you really believe that humans can or do operate "rationally" about any significant part of their lives, you should probably step back and re-examine your own behavior and that of those around you. Your definition of "rational" and the assumption that it could be universal is itself irrational. The fact that you spent any time typing a comment on this site is wildly irrational.

[fsflover]

> The fact that you spent any time typing a comment on this site is wildly irrational.

I find making such comments very rational: They convince random observers not to support wars and child labor without any reason apart from following blind marketing.

> If you really believe that humans can or do operate "rationally" about any significant part of their lives

People can and do operate rationally from time to time: It's our main difference from the animals.

> Your definition of "rational" and the assumption that it could be universal is itself irrational.

If your definition of "rational" is supporting wars and child labor, then I indeed agree with you that you are irrational.

[blindhippo]

While I personally would agree with your distinction, I do thing your example demonstrates a relative bias. For most of us, yeah, there is a difference between adding chocolate syrup to ice cream and a buying a 10kUSD piece of jewelry just because.

Yet for many other people, there is little to no practical difference in the value of those two choices. Are rich people some how less pragmatic/objective because 10k is effectively pocket change to them?

My point here is that there is no objective sense of rationality here - it's all relative to the point of the observer, and casting judgement on others from your own particular viewpoint is largely meaningless (and presumptuous).

[ako]

There's so much irrationality in the world, everyone is guilty of them: irrationally believing in gods, irrationally being happy when someone else wins a sports match, irrationally being happy with a very expensive red sportscar, etc, etc, etc.

[nly]

All of those things are rational.

- Religion brings some people comfort and peace.

- Sports speak to our tribal nature evolved over millions of years.

- Sports cars are fun and exhilarating to drive and a status symbol or wealth and success, which help to attract mates.

[PawgerZ]

How does bringing comfort and peace mean that religion is not irrational? (I don't personally believe it is irrational, just that your logic is flawed.)

[ako]

But it is irrational that religion brings people comfort and peace. Why do stories do this?

[UncleMeat]

Moissanite is also irrational if we push on this. Why does it get a complete pass?

[fsflover]

Moissanite looks quite rational to me: It's very pretty without terrible externalities plus makes a reasonable investment.

[ben0x539]

Not marrying someone given such a huge values discrepancy sounds like the right move, though.

[atleastoptimal]

I understand the point your making with respect to most things. Wife wants 1.3x price carpet instead of x price carpet because it looks better. They discuss and compromise. Husband wants to go to 2y price vacation instead of y price, they compromise on 1.5y price. Bride wants z+50 people at wedding and groom wants z, etc. so on. The synthesis of love languages, consumer culture, the psychological musings of commitment, devotion, the pleasures of our immortality projects in monogamy, etc. is deeply ingrained into the human experience. It's a part of why we live, do things, work our psyches into powerful frenzies on the esteem and cares of others. I get that. It's wonderful, it's beautiful.

However, I personally think the "rings must have a very expensive diamond" thing to be very silly. I know that it may be subjectively very important to the potential recipient, but that it seems to sometimes really be so inflexible feels murky in the "what normally tacit power dynamic in this relationship is this revealing?" sort of way. The only significant tangible difference between the diamond and moissanite is the mental totem: "It is a diamond, he bought a diamond for me. He wanted to buy something else but I wanted this and he got it". Which is a problem when it comes to that: that the recipient cannot budge on something so arbitrary. It feels more like the whispers of the DeBeers cultural brainwashing: "You don't deserve to have her if the sacrifice you made to purchase this wasn't big enough"

If a woman gets X amount of utility from a diamond ring over an alternative, how would it be invalid if I said I got -X utility from having to purchase it?

This is one of those hard to beat arguments where I know I'm not facing a purely rational point of view. I understand it, that's why I added the first paragraph of this response. It's one of those issues where I feel I'd need to have a Christopher Hitchens level of rhetorical skill to make any headway in my favor.

[sneak]

People who make irrational choices about large financial purchases don’t make good long term life partners.

[oblio]

Wait till you hear that car purchases are largely emotional and 99% of what we say about those decisions are post-facto rationalizations.

[fsflover]

Does it mean you can forget about rationality forever and stop trying to bring it to the world?

[oblio]

I wouldn't use those crusader stat points in my personal life. Unless other character incompatibilities are already apparent.

[Reubachi]

As someone else already mentioned, did your last vehicle purchase involve you cost-analyzing every individual part of your car versus other cars in it's class? Of course not.

I know that a 33k Mazda3 and a 33k Honda Civic are "similar", but neither of them are exactly worth the same 33 thousand dollars. But who cares, really? Ultimately, even a 33k purchase is a "throw" away. You're not gonna compare control arm thickness to find the better value, and you're not gonna examine where the materials came from.