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I read a book that blew my mind a little

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Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#41

Post by jazzyjackson »

2bitencryption wrote: post #21

as someone with zero understanding of how Twitter works: did this author actually click "post" on 20+ individual Tweets? And hope that Twitter presents them uninterrupted in chronological order? Or does Twitter provide some way to write a "Medium.com style" article and have it broken into tweets? Am I old or something? I'm not even 30 yet and I cannot wrap my brain around this format or what Twitter is supposed to pr…

IIRC (got banned from twitter for 'bot like activity' first time I replied to Elon Musk): Pressing "Enter" sends the tweet, so it's pretty natural to just keep typing more posts.

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#42

Post by cracell »

bawolff wrote: post #39
guyzero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little subtler than that: peers don't just influence to do things, they influence you to want things.

That's still just the normal definition of peer pressure.

No, no. It's this new thing I invented.

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#43

Post by float4 »

boplicity wrote: post #32

>Of course, none of these desires relate in any way to your personal happiness or true desires. This is where it lost me. I can't agree with this statement. Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them. The natural response, of course, is to choose the people in your life, as well as be aware of the pros and cons of having those people in your life. Most people who have a big…

René Girard is the man who worked out the theory of mimetism a couple decades ago, but he's not even mentioned here. If you want a proper explanation of mimetic theory, you should read some of his books.

> Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them

Girard acknowledges that many people before him, e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Evangelists, were very aware of mimetic theory. You notice that when you read their works, as their characters behave in a way that is just too consistent with mimetism for it to be a coincidence. Girard was simply the first to explicitly explain the theory and work it out.

Lastly, although I, like so many others, discovered mimetism by myself when I was a teenager, Girards books were still very enlightening to me. He takes a pretty trivial theory, but works it out very thoroughly and draws a lot of insightful conclusions from it.

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#44

Post by [deleted] »

thundergolfer wrote: post #19

I've got very different politics to Peter Thiel, but I've long been interested in why he thinks what he thinks. I think he's the most honest and interesting billionaire around. The place to go seems to be Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , but I'll need to take a holiday on a beach somewhere to have the headspace to get through its ~500 pages.

[deleted]

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#45

Post by karmakaze »

I must have gone through a maturing period where I shed many of these extrinsic wants and found myself wanting so little. It was so rare that I ever wanted things that I started to wonder if there was something wrong. Only after reading the post does this make a lot more sense to me now. I drove a BMW convertible for a bit and I know the image that goes with bimmer drivers and I just didn't care. A friend of mine actually noticed how much joy I got from driving it and said that I'm driving it for myself which stood out. For the record, convertibles are in a separate category and everyone likes seeing one in the summer with the top down and tunes cranking. It did all sort itself out anyway as I still as always have itches to scratch and challenging new things to learn and discover.

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#46

Post by 50 »

See also Walter Benjamin's short piece "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933)[1]. In short: "...language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic."

1. http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Benjamin-4-22-Mimetic%20Faculty.pdf

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#47

Post by monkeycantype »

float4 wrote: post #43
boplicity wrote: post #32

>Of course, none of these desires relate in any way to your personal happiness or true desires. This is where it lost me. I can't agree with this statement. Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them. The natural response, of course, is to choose the people in your life, as well as be aware of the pros and cons of having those people in your life. Most people who have a big…

René Girard is the man who worked out the theory of mimetism a couple decades ago, but he's not even mentioned here. If you want a proper explanation of mimetic theory, you should read some of his books. > Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them Girard acknowledges that many people before him, e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Evangelists, were very aware of mimetic theo…

Hell yeah.

Conversations on this topic have gone off the rails, to the point of being flagged, with groups talking past each other, a set critiquing a cheesy blog post or Thiel and another group defending Girard's idea. I haven't read as much of Girard as my library fines for his books might suggest, but what I have read affected me deeply, it brought clarity to ideas I was perceiving in a muggy form that I couldn't quite communicate. If mimetic theory seems silly, I think it's worth reading it from Girard, rather than from primates such as myself, chattering incoherently about happened in their head when they read his ideas.

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#48

Post by softwaredoug »

I have wondered a lot recently about this too. Why do wee seek out drama and controversy when our lives have become so comfortable and easy? Why when scanning (social) media do we so easily fall for clickbait and ignore the intellectual topics?

My theory is that comfortable people lack purpose. We intentionally seek drama and controversy because it's hard to bear the purposeless of life. Contentment is one of the hardest things to achieve.

Instead of contentment, we want to join in on the twitter mob. We want to take action. We want to feel a sense of purpose, that overrides any careful analysis of the situation. We want to feel incensed because in the end we want to feel like we live in some historic moment where we fight deep injustices of the world. When in reality, we mostly don't have the stomach for the hard battles. We can join in the Twitter mob, cancel somebody needlessly, and feel a brief sense that we did something important.

Anything to alleviate that sense of purposeless in life...

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#49

Post by itisit »

cracell wrote: post #42
bawolff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still just the normal definition of peer pressure.

No, no. It's this new thing I invented.

You should write a book on this that inverts, expands, and deconstructs this idea over the course of 300 or so pages with a bunch of questionable anecdotes, historical narrative, and pseudoscience analysis.

Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little

#50

Post by alphabettsy »

gtirloni wrote: post #11
cap10morgan wrote: post #8

Peter Thiel almost certainly didn’t invent this. The idea that our decisions are heavily influenced by those around us is one of those things that’s been well-established in the relevant scientific communities for some time but has a hard time breaking into the popular consciousness because we don’t want it to be true.

He said Peter "popularized" it, not invented.

He didn’t popularize it either.
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