Mimetic Traps
briantimar.github.io
briantimar.github.io
> Academics have uniformly rather low salaries, increasing our tendency to focus on social status as a measure of success. Salary gradations are useful for disrupting mimetic effects because they tie effort expended directly to units of universal economic value — convertible to kilos of rice, oil, and stuff in the physical world. A price is a lifeline to reality: all else being equal, the job with the lower wage is probably less valuable. Without this signal, the goals of a peer group are easily decoupled from the outside world, making it easy to drift into time-wasting pursuits.
What a concept, endeavors detached from price signals and the specific distortions he faced in his academic “market” if you will.
They are both potentially flawed in their core if the expectation is that they will solve our societal issues. They are both memes in that they are evolved to propagate themselves. And that's what they do best.
In my experience, deconstructing meaning and value have been most instrumental to me personally finding good ways of constructing meaning and value.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. I love these conversations.
This goes straight into Google Keep for a rainy day
> Also, that specific point makes me think of sales which just makes me shudder
Yeah. I maintain that currently, the marginal RoI on sales&marketing is greater than on actually doing something useful - it's too easy to bullshit people into giving you money, so making money is only weakly correlated with doing something useful.
(I know this hinges on the definition of "useful" and I haven't put enough time to clarify it even for myself, but roughly: for me, something useful means making people happier or suffer less, or increasing the pool of knowledge about the world humanity has. Making people suffer, or part with their money for very suboptimal reasons, has negative utility.)
edit - and HN definitely is ;)