the distal science + green grow the crushes

Martine writes:

i've had independent conversations with friends who have said they feel like the outsider of a group. when i ask them to describe who the core of a group is, each ends up listing the other that had described herself as the outsider. essentially a group ends up consisting of a bunch of people who think they're the one on the outside while thinking the rest of the people are a cohesive whole.

One can observe an exactly analogous phenomenon if you go up to sociologists and ask them who a "mainstream sociologist" is.

With regard to Ang & Martine's back-and-forth crush discussion: although JFW rarely weighs in on any matters of the heart, two points do have to be made:

1. As a matter of mathematical necessity, the average crush of the average person is of a sort where the crushee is the object of more crushes-by-other-people than the crusher. The proof is left as an exercise for those bloggers who occasionally burst into calculus.

2. Crushes are always known to the crusher and only occasionally known to the crushee. To be the sort of person who would sit down and count as many outgoing crushes and incoming crushes, you would--not quite by mathematical necessity--have to have either a massive crushee:crusher ratio or be the sort of person who often falsely judges her/himself to be a crushed object.