Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
The intended formulation, I should think, is "You are the only denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships" (which is to say that it might be a contingent fact about your particular set of failed relationships that it has some more common denominators, but for any set of all of any particular person's failed relationships, that person will always, by definition, be common to them all).
Even this might be false when taken literally... so perhaps we need to qualify it just a bit more:
"You are the only interesting denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships." (i.e. if we consider only those factors along which relationships-in-general differ from each other, i.e. those dimensions in relationship space which we can't just ignore).
That, I think, is a reasonable, charitable reading of the original quote.
It's not nitpicking on my side, there are plenty of people who tend to blame themselves for anything going wrong, even when it was outside their control. Maybe they lived in a neighborhood incompatible to themselves, especially pre-social media. Think of 'nerds' stranded in classes without peers. Sure, their behavior was involved in the success or failure of their relationships (how could it not have been?). However, a mindset and pseudo-wise aphorisms such as "you are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships" would be fueling an already destructive fire of gnawing self-doubt with more gasoline.