I read a book that blew my mind a little
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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
#2That thread also blew my mind a bit. I do ask the question when I want something. "Why do I want this ?".
Something that drew my attention to this phenomenon is all the ridiculous Hollywood movie scripts. It's always an unpopular teenager who'll then gain superpowers and impress people in his high-school, and everyone will ooh and aaah and take pictures and videos of him doing something 'cool', and the proverbial girl becoming impressed. It's the guy swallowing a pill and magically becoming fluent in several languages and masterfully play instruments to the audience's awe and women's lust.
I find there is such an emptiness that makes me almost certain those who write these either are virgins, or write them for virgins. Either way, it is sad.
I also see it in interests (language learning, writing, book reading, singing, writing, film making, and music) in the circles I frequent made of people in these fields, and it is accurate down to the speech patterns sometimes.
Sometimes, however, I think that this intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy has its limits. You may start learning something or wanting something because of, or thanks to, someone else. It is extrinsic, but is it ? It is by definition. Can something you're not aware of be intrinsic. People you frequent expose you to different tastes and passions and fields and horizons.
You may have started programming extrinsically because someone you respect did it, and it unlocks an intrinsic desire.
Because of or thanks to depends on what you make of it.
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#3It's "Keeping Up With the Joneses" in annoying Twitter thread form.
Is that mind blowing?
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#4The book is called ‘Wanting’, by an guy named Luke Burgis.
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#5See also Purity Spiral.
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#6You mean, the basic logic of kids in preschool who only want the toy some other kid is playing with?
Yes, the world is full of sheep dazed by the sheer complexity and cacophony of the modern world. It's very hard to make logical decisions about every part of your life, instead people glom onto templates to follow. It's just a lot easier.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good, interesting idea. Maybe "wanting" the book has deeper ideas...
But it's hilarious the thread name-drops Peter Thiel in a SF-focused thread about wanting things only because prominent people have/want them, when it's basically advocating for deciding your own way.
One of the inherent parts of humanity the social animal is belonging. People do many things subconsciously simply to belong.
Our world is utterly insane. We are headed towards an environmental disaster if you do the smallest amount of research or thought, and yet a strict environmental lifestyle is viewed as, at best, eccentricity.
No one is happy it seems, yet everyone buys into the same materialistic sales campaigns and keeps doing the same thing over and over to try to make themselves happy, the colloquial definition of insanity.
The amazing invention of marketing in the 20th-21st centuries is that marketing unlocked people tautologically and defensively want because other people want. By highlighting that everyone wants and hoards, it makes everyone defensively hoard, because we all evolved in resource scarcity, so seeing people hoard triggers us all to hoard defensively.
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#7It's often underappreciated how _hard_ it can be to tell why you want something.
I've spent weeks thinking as rationally as I could about a decision, and with years of hindsight realised it was based mainly on what others wanted.
If anyone feels they've solved this, I'd love to hear how.
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#8Peter 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.
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#9Rene Girard 'invented' "mimetic desire"
I think what the tweet thread author learned about mimetic desire is not quite the same thing as I think Girard describes:
> "Your desire, the desire I’m imitating, could have been insignificant at first, maybe it didn’t even have much intensity. But when I go for the same object as you, the intensity of your desire increases. You thus become my imitator, just as I am yours. What’s essential is this feedback process that makes it so that any two desires can become a sort of infernal machine. " - Rene Girard, When These Things Begin (2005).
> “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” - Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory
Girard's scapegoat mechanism is quite interesting.. it works like this:
1. one day, there is widespread chaos in society - e.g. the black plague
2. people identify a scapegoat
This directs the -- otherwise highly entropic and contingently-distributed -- totality of individual agency unto a single focal point - the scapegoat who is to blame for inviting or causing this calamity, the scapegoat who victimizes society
e.g. the Spanish inquisition, House Un-American Activities Committee, etc.
3. vitriol bubbles over into violence, the scapegoat is murdered by a mob in some fashion
e.g. the assassination of Martin Luther King
4. some go "maybe we went too far", the victim is elevated into some kind of posthumous saintly angelic figure who was themselves the victim of society's ills
e.g. also Martin Luther King.. apparently he was intensely disliked shortly before his assassination "in 1966 -- the last Gallup measure of King using this scalometer procedure -- it was 32% positive and 63% negative." In 1999 he was the 2nd most admired American[0] [1]
Interestingly, it seems like the majority of people thought King's approach was hurting the cause for racial equality:
"Less than a year after the march, Americans were even more convinced that mass demonstrations harmed the cause, with 74% saying they felt these actions were detrimental to achieving racial equality and just 16% saying they were helping it." [2] Racial equality, I assume by the framing of the question, being an outcome that the majority of Americans did want.
5. If the problem just 'fixes itself' (which is not so unusual - easy come, easy go) as time passes.. it's like society-scale operant conditioning on the logical implication operator p → q: (violence against scapegoat) → (society improves). p is false, q is true, so p → q.. what does this mean? This violent cycle continues over and over again.. the mob believing in the illusion that persecution healed the world.
The scapegoat mechanism is a trope that is pretty unscientific. It's not falsifiable, as far as I can tell. But I swear to God I see some kind of version of this loop almost every single day..
And, yeah, notably, Peter Thiel is an avowed Girardian
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/20920/martin-luther-king-jr-rev...
[1] There is definitely a bit of a selection bias in this example bc I'm not talking about the people that remained popular after their death. But whatever.
[2] https://news.gallup.com/vault/246167/protests-seen-harming-c...
Re: I read a book that blew my mind a little
#10Peter 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.
Peter Thiel has mentioned the works and ideas of philosopher René Girard repeatedly. I think that's what he's referring to.