What the F*ck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love
On Healthy Disagreement Plus a Bumper Rattle Bag
Catch-up service:
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
The couple in the picture went viral after a TV camera caught them apparently having a bad tempered row at a basketball game in Indianapolis. The man is gesticulating vigorously, the woman is looking off to the side with a face like thunder. She then turns fire on him, at one point quite clearly saying, “What the fuck are you talking about?”.
Sports Illustrated (among many other media outlets) got in touch with the couple. It turns out this was an exquisitely middle class row. They were arguing about the value of a liberal arts education, having been prompted by a discussion of the topic on a recent New York Times podcast. And while the exchange was robust, it wasn’t hostile.
I absolutely love the woman’s account of the argument, which is funny, fine-grained, and rather romantic. I have to quote it in full:
“Even saying that out loud, I can hear you yawning through the phone,” Grace told SI. ” … The thing is, Michael and I have been together for four years—wonderful, happy years. But that’s just what we do. We both just talk. He’s frighteningly smart. So what everyone witnessed was me listening to his well-articulated thoughts and responding with what you saw, which was ‘What the f--- are you talking about?’ I think that was probably to kill time while I thought of a rebuttal. Because that’s sometimes what you have to do. Sometimes you ad hominem, sometimes you just raise your voice, and other times you actually already have something to say. I think that I did a mix of the two while I sorted out my thoughts. That’s just how we always talk, and it’s fun, and we’re always just doing that. That’s it. It’s so boring.”
Every group which spends time together has a culture, and a couple is just a small group. The woman is effectively telling us, “This is our culture. This is how we do things here.” Watch the clip without cultural context and you get a misleading view of what’s going on. I love that sentence near the end, in particular: (“That’s just how we always talk, and it’s fun, and we’re always just doing that.”). It’s such a beautiful description of a healthy practice of disagreement.
I don’t know what personal conflicts this couple will face in years to come, but I’m pretty confident they will be well-equipped to handle them. In my book on disagreement there’s a section on romantic relationships. I look at the evidence that couples who are more willing to have arguments with each other are more likely to stay together, and to overcome problems when they arise.
One reason for that is that habitual practice in low-stakes arguments makes it easier to deal with high-stakes conflict. The participants feel equipped to talk out their problems rather than avoid them, and to express frustrations rather than bottle them up. Another reason is that argument is a great way to keep yourself abreast of what your partner is feeling and thinking. Conflict is information. A third reason would be the one the woman outlines above: it’s stimulating.
Of course, some couples who argue a lot are making each other unhappy. Argument is destructive and corrosive if it involves unresolved resentment and bitterness. But if a couple likes and trusts each other, then an argument, even a heated one involving swear words, isn’t some some deeply unsettling event in the relationship, but just an everyday part of their culture. It’s boring. It’s fun.
This week I’ve done a bunch of bite-sized posts - it’s one big Rattle Bag. Next up, I look at:
Why AI hasn’t improved customer service (and what this tells us about how fast it will change the economy).
What the latest Starmer scandal tells us about him (and about politics generally)
How to buy happiness (a new study)
Plus, an actual miracle of medical science; one of the best front pages ever; how to deal with conspiracy theorists; how to value Open AI; an intriguing theory of why The Beatles put Her Majesty at the end of Abbey Road, and more…
Paid subscriptions are what makes The Ruffian possible. You get the best of the Ruffian every week, access the archive, plus the chance to argue with me in the comments.
Why Aren’t We Getting the Customer Service We Were Promised?
After LLMs suddenly emerged as the next big thing in 2023 it was frequently claimed they would soon transform customer service. That made sense to me. The CS systems of big companies are notoriously poor. The human agents inside them were following scripts and rules. The existing bots were extremely limited. If any industry was ripe for an AI upgrade, it was this one.
It would also be a positive story for AI, since in theory, everyone would gain. Companies would gain efficiencies by replacing staff with software. Fewer people would have to work in call centres (I’ve done it, it’s not fun). Consumers would get quicker, better service. That would all be something to lay on the positive side of the ledger, versus mass unemployment, cyberwars, and human extinction.
But it hasn’t happened, has it? Every time I struggle to navigate the website or app of my bank or an airline I think how nice it would be to have a Claude-style interface (in fact, I often resort to Claude, just as I learned that Google was a better way to search a particular website than the website’s internal search function). As it is, we’re pretty much stuck with the old system of call centres and dumb bots.
Why is that? I posed this question on Twitter/X this week and got some great answers from people who know what they’re talking about. I think these answers tell us something about the rate of change we can expect across the economy more broadly.
