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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

#61

Post by photojosh »

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.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning is another good Girard intro point, and 2/5ths of the length of Things Hidden. It was written 22 years later, and reflects the evolution of Girard's thinking in that time.

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

#63

Post by brailsafe »

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…

Same. It's kind of hard to believe people are still on what should be a dead platform, nevermind that people have made it even worse with long form threads like this.

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

#64

Post by guerrilla »

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…

No, the person is replying to themselves. That's how you create threads. There is a UI mechanic to make it trivial as well but it's only been around for a couple of years.

It's the same as how threaded email and news clients work but there's one small difference: the display will prioritize the originator over other people who are also replying.

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

#66

Post by steve_adams_86 »

I believe this is a significant component of socializing for people. It isn’t as though it’s some dark manipulative force overcoming people and steering them away from what’s truly meaningful to them. In many ways this actually creates a lot of social cohesion and familiarity amongst groups. It generates shared motivations and desires.

Sure, maybe it’ll keep you from gardening quietly on some Sundays on your own. It’ll also keep you engaged and involved with your group, push you to seek something, keep you motivated, etc.

I’ve struggled with not having this element in my life and it’s quite familiar to me, but from a different a perspective. I don’t tend to want what the people around me want. I don’t tend to get excited about the same stuff for the same reasons. I watch other people do it though and I recognize how much it eludes me and how much it appears to be a very natural and normal part of socializing.

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

#67

Post by steve_adams_86 »

sMarsIntruder wrote: post #65

No offence to anyone but this is very “American”. As a European I can tell that there are absolutely some places with the same “issues”. But no, I feel free where I live since my peers don’t give a duck about “metrics”.

I think what he’s describing is fairly typical of most or all humans, but I’d agree that the examples given aren’t and they do seem particularly American.

Even outside of bubbles like that I see people do this quite often. It could be that the best examples of it are kids. Memetic propagation of desires is almost borg-like with them. I suspect all kids do it and it continues in many (but probably more subtle) forms into adulthood.

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

#68

Post by romwell »

jes5199 wrote: post #30
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…

the twitter UI lets you type a bunch of tweets in a row. You get used to it other formats of text start to feel overwrought, unnecessarily verbose, full of meaningless filler

Other formats?

You just described this post!

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

#69

Post by tonyedgecombe »

karmakaze wrote: post #45

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 act…

>and everyone likes seeing one in the summer with the top down and tunes cranking

I'm not so sure about that.

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

#70

Post by ramblerman »

monkeycantype wrote: post #47
float4 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

any book, or entry point you can recommend to start with?
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