[rayiner]

Normal people value their families first and foremost, which necessarily limits the closeness of non-kinship relationships. I tell my kids about their great grandfather, a man they’ve never met and who I met when I was five (but who my mom lionized). Your friends’ kids won’t talk about you. Now, obviously you won’t care because you’ll be dead. But it’s reflective of the difference in the depth of the relationship during life.

I don't say this to be an asshole, but to point out that, if you are a non-shitty person, you are a presumptive source of stability for some young cousin, niece, or nephew. Because their friends won't care about them as much as those friends care about their own families.

[mym1990]

I get where this sentiment is coming from, I wouldn’t put “normal people” at the start of it. Families are very complex and many normal people do not have normal relationships with any number of those people in their family, and the value proposition of these relationships are understandably low.

[marcusverus]

His usage of the word is correct and appropriate. Exceptions exist, obviously. So do norms. Valuing your family first and foremost is normal--thank god!

[mym1990]

You are misunderstanding. I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal. Family is a part of someone's life, and if you choose to define that person based on their family relationships, that is a mistake. There are so many people who are perfectly normal, and do not have close ties to a majority of their family. I have friends who are absolutely like brothers and sisters to me, and my kids will know and hear about them as well.

If you think people having abnormal families is a exception, you need to step outside your front door. I would say almost every family has people that other family members would not go out of the way for, and the circumstances are all that can define those situations, not a blanket "family is everything" statement.

[skissane]

> I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal

I'm abnormal, in various ways. Some of those are (at least partially) my fault, some of them are entirely the fault of people other than me, some of them are nobody's fault. Everyone is abnormal, in at least a few ways. All families are abnormal–in some respects. Whether anybody should be ashamed to be abnormal depends entirely on the details of the specific abnormalities we are talking about.

People don't have relationships with their families for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, their family deserves all the blame, and they are an innocent victim. Sometimes, they deserve all the blame, and their family is an innocent victim. Sometimes, everyone is to blame. Maybe, sometimes, nobody is to blame. All those situations are abnormal (in the sense that normatively they should not occur), and a person or family in an abnormal situation is (in a certain sense) themselves abnormal. But, as I said, whether anyone ought to be ashamed of that abnormality depends on all those details, of how exactly they ended up in that situation.

[mym1990]

The initial sentiment was not discussing the details in which people are normal or abnormal, but the aggregate understanding of what a "normal person" might be. You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline, which could just be what this whole discussion boils down to anyways. Otherwise, I agree with all of your points.

[skissane]

> You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline

You can't meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in the same way.

You can meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in lots of different ways, if for each of those individual ways, only a small minority of people (say <5%) is abnormal in that way.

Consider the variable "number of deceased older siblings at time of birth". For most people, that's zero. For a small minority of people, that's 1. For me, it is 5. That's extremely abnormal, I expect there'd be less than 0.001% of the population for whom that variable is so high. I'd be rather surprised if you were abnormal in that particular way, although surely there are other ways in which you are abnormal but I am not.

[Dalewyn]

I am happy to be abnormal then. I value friends first and foremost, family dead last. If my family wants something from me, they can line up with everyone else; if I consider them a friend I'll value them like all my other friends.

Put another way, I don't treat blood ties as anything special because doing so leads to bullshit. If that's abnormal, so be it; not my loss or problem.

[mym1990]

Nothing wrong with this, family ties can be ripe with abuse... free loading, mental abuse, etc...

For many people keeping a level playing field is the only way to keep the bullshit out, although I doubt anyone manages to get rid of all of it.

[nec4b]

If I understand you correctly, you value your kids or your spouse less than your friends? How does this work in practice?

[em-bee]

he is talking about blood ties, that means siblings, parents and other relatives, not his wife.

i have a good relationship to one of my brothers, and no relationship at all to the other. likewise i have no relationship at all with my dads family. mostly because they are all much older. the few cousins my age i wasn't able to connect to for unknown reasons, even though i went to school with at least one of them. on the other hand i have a fabulous relationship with one of the cousins on my mothers side, despite not growing up together, nor having seen each other for decades. the difference? character and upbringing i guess. i also have a great relationship with his parents despite serious religious differences. my own parents? loyal, supportive but distant. i do have few good friends, who are quite clearly closer than many relatives. how could it even be otherwise? the closest is my partner, well, because, she wouldn't be my partner otherwise.

all-in-all, i am not very close to most of my family, something which my partner and their family could not understand at all. the mere idea of not being close to family was completely alien to them.

and in the end, this lack of closeness affected me greatly throughout my life.

so i value those that appreciate my presence. regardless of how we are related.

[skissane]

> i have a good relationship to one of my brothers, and no relationship at all to the other. likewise i have no relationship at all with my dads family. mostly because they are all much older. the few cousins my age i wasn't able to connect to for unknown reasons, even though i went to school with at least one of them.

I've always wished I was closer to my cousins than I am. Some of it is my fault, much of it is nobody's fault. But, I've never thought this was "normal". Well, in a descriptive sense, it probably is quite normal, in contemporary Western societies – while far less normal when compared to human history as a whole. Normatively, however, I don't think it is how the world should ideally be, and so in that sense it is abnormal, and hence (in that respect) I am abnormal.

I've always been least close to one of my brothers. There's reasons for that. In the last year or so, we've both been actively trying to improve our relationship. But again, I say that in ideal circumstances we would have always been closer, so in that sense I say our relationship has been normatively abnormal, which is another way in which I am normatively abnormal.

[nec4b]

Thank you for the explanation, I can understand that.

[beedeebeedee]

> His usage of the word is correct and appropriate. Exceptions exist, obviously. So do norms. Valuing your family first and foremost is normal--thank god!

Yet, so many normal people do atrocious things- countless examples of normal mothers and fathers who abuse their kids, etc. You can say they are not normal, but that is just falling into the true scotsman fallacy.

[skissane]

> Yet, so many normal people do atrocious things- countless examples of normal mothers and fathers who abuse their kids, etc.

The problem is the word "normal" is ambiguous. It has both descriptive senses (e.g. "normal" as within two standard deviations of the mean) and normative senses ("normal" as conforming to norms which tell us how things should be), and people often shift between the two or mix them up without making that distinction clear.

> You can say they are not normal, but that is just falling into the true scotsman fallacy.

I don't think this is the "no true Scotsman fallacy" at all. Whether child abuse is "normal" in a descriptive sense is a factual question–I don't know the answer, but there are means available to produce one non-fallaciously (e.g. prevalence surveys). Whether child abuse is "normal" in the normative sense (conforming to norms of how things should be)–I hope we can all agree that "no, it isn't", and there is no fallacy in saying that.

[beedeebeedee]

Yes, I think you see my point. Talking about normality in regard to human behavior is incredibly superficial. Normality in that sense is more like a mask that is put on, which the wearer is often unaware they are doing. We are herd animals, and trying to blend into the herd is a behavior many of us feel compelled to do (and can involve as much self-deception as it can deception of others).

In my experience, the normal distribution of people I have met are from families that have problems (some more severe than others), yet that is the last thing they would share. They feel compelled to be normal and present themselves as happy, normal families.

[Retric]

Normality isn’t some mask it’s what you get from reasonably typical genetics and reasonably typical environments. Most people have something unusual about them, and the existence of such divination is completely normal because there’s so many different criteria. Similarly, the vast majority of 90 year olds have multiple significant health issues even if there isn’t a specific issue that’s nearly as universal.

It’s therefore normal for people to speak at least one language even if no specific language is universal.

PS: Humans aren’t herd animals, we’re social animals but there’s many kinds of social species. Ants, wolves, gorilla, and prairie dogs all have very distinct social structures from each other while cows, elk, etc have quite a lot in common with each other.

[skissane]

> In my experience, the normal distribution of people I have met are from families that have problems (some more severe than others), yet that is the last thing they would share. They feel compelled to be normal and present themselves as happy, normal families.

I think you are now talking about a third thing – "normality" as an appearance to which one feels social pressure to conform.

In many cultures, it is viewed as inappropriate to "air one's dirty laundry" with acquaintances, work colleagues, etc – "oversharing" – something which should be limited to close friends/family.

[jancsika]

> Your friends’ kids won’t talk about you.

They likely will if the kids witness how their parent treasures that friendship.

By your own logic, even. What could "value their families first and foremost" possibly mean if the love a family member has for a friend-- and vice versa-- doesn't end up deeply affecting the bond the rest of the family has with that same person?

The exception that comes to mind is when a family has real question about whether that same level of love/respect is reciprocal-- e.g., they suspect their family member is being used by their friend, or perhaps both are involved in a spiral of drugs, etc. Outside of that, a family disrespecting a close friendship would make me question the health/depth of the familial bonds.

[rayiner]

> What could "value their families first and foremost" possibly mean if the love a family member has for a friend-- and vice versa-- doesn't end up deeply affecting the bond the rest of the family has with that same person

We have many close family friends, since we immigrated far from our biological family. They can be loved and respected. But they’re still in a circle outside your family. Like, if you had to pick between your uncle’s life or your family friend’s it wouldn’t even be a close call for most people.

Frankly, this conversation would come across as bizarre to most people because it’s so obviously true. I think the only reason this fallacy exists is this western individualist yearning for complete self determination. This desire to transcend relational networks imposed by birth and believe that relationships built on choice can be as strong.