College as an incubator of Girardian terror
danwang.co
danwang.co
> nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18
> It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other.
> Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes
I'm not sure where this author went to college, but outside of a major city like London or NYC, you'd be hard pressed to find a more experientially diverse place (in America, at least) even amongst freshmen. Sure, there is class self-selection, but this seems like a really naive statement at best, and propaganda at worst. There were dorms specifically for married students, and the state gave tuition breaks to people older than 30. The only way you'd meet people who'd taken your classes is if you hung out in your department socially. There were many colleges in the university and hundreds of undergraduate courses: if you wanted to meet people who had no idea about what you were studying you just had to go to a different dining hall at a different time.
To be honest it seems like this person is observing that, in a large group small sub-groups will form based on all sorts of criteria like geographical closeness and experiential background, and within those groups "memes" will spread efficiently the more similar people are? This doesn't seem novel or the basis on to which to extrapolate that somehow the result is negative or in any way new in society.
Anyway,
> Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead.
now that is some advice I can get behind.
EDIT: After finishing the article it strikes me that this person may have gone to a school that would be in the set he describes as "elite." I think this might have warped his worldview because they're the only places where people can unironically imagine America as a "meritocracy" as described.
Kids compete at whatever they are good at, including the cohort who are good at academics. Jocks think weaklings are losers, and nerds think dumbdumbs are losers.
Not everyone does, but everyone knows one.
But in most cases, that first semester of college beats that out of them.
This seems to be a different claim than “they get the same indoctrination as each other”, which certainly seems fairly true from the fallout in a 9-5 job.
Granted, I think this is more of a problem with the “ivies” (public and private) than an endemic one as there’s less pressure to politically and economically conform.
École Nationale des Chartes Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Nationale_des_Chart...
Grandes écoles (of which group "École Nationale des Chartes is a member) Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles
My bad.
FWIW, Wang went to the University of Rochester in the U.S. Source: https://danwang.co/about/
"In the US, where I attended college, nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18. When they start school, few people have a clear sense of the career path they’ll set on; it’s rare to meet a person who has high confidence of what they’ll end up doing, and even rarer to see someone who actually follows that plan. Instead, people happily confess that they don’t know what they’ll do, and that they’ll figure it out by trying different classes and by joining clubs, sports teams, fraternities, and so on."
I attended college in the United States as well, at UT Austin, and although I have only peripheral experience with the business school, that seems much more true of business students than any other majors I interacted with. Almost universally, the students are young, and choose that school because it offers good jobs if they have no "clear sense of a career path". His further comments, such as "By construction, whatever distinctions any does have are usually earned through brutal, zero-sum competitions", only emphasize the impression.
In the STEM majors, you'd best hit the ground running, or you will spend some extra semesters catching up on things. [But, isn't "they’ll figure [what they'll do] out" one of the advantages of attending college?] On the other hand, there isn't anything "zero-sum competition" about it; do you know what they call the person who graduated from medical school in last place? "Doctor". Also, and moreso in other majors such as liberal arts, "[m]ost [students] are not super differentiated from each other" is simply false. Significant chunks of the students are older, from other countries, or just have otherwise odd backgrounds. (One of the guys I graduated with was getting twin degrees in CS and music; we didn't regard this as "zero-sum competitive dynamics", we just thought he was insane. Which he admitted himself.)
Also, after finishing the article, I'm just very confused. I can't find a definition of "mimetic contagion", or why he would think Reddit-like "memes" have anything to do with it. I also find comments like,
"No one has ever asked me how one should escape mimetic contagion on campus. Still here’s my answer: If one must go to college, I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead."
to be rather horrifying. He seems to be both complaining about and advising the kind of intellectual inbreeding that colleges are designed to avoid. Take the damn electives outside your major; explore the options while you still have some left.
Finally, I can't make head nor tails out of "[i]f one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges."
1. "American meritocracy"? Does such exist? Is that good or bad? If it's good, why is it a catastrophe?
2. "Growing tendency"? The "people running the country" have always come from the elite colleges and "hothouse environments".
3. When he says, "where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles", is he unaware of the Southern tradition of honor?
And he says, "I think mimetic contagion is worst in US colleges. In Canada, people apply to major in certain subjects; if they earn admission, it’s not so easy to switch, so there’s less of this intellectual loitering that one finds on American campuses." So, apparently, closing off your options as early as possible is a good way to avoid "mimetic contagion"?
P.S.
"Thiel gets at the learning capacity of the latter when he makes a point about Aspergers in the Valley: “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, then you’re less likely to do the same thing as everyone else around you. If you’re interested in making things or programming computers, you’ll be less afraid to pursue these activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.”"
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" say Wernher von Braun
Isn't that inequality? It sounds like if it's equal (both get grapes or both get cucumbers) everything is fine.
The study is implying that people/monkeys get agitated only when people/monkeys of their own perceived level/rank/group do better.
For example, you and your brother aren't be agitated because your dad has all the money. That inequality doesn't bother you. But if your dad gave you $10 and your brother $100, I'm sure you'd get upset.
Or if your company's payroll was leaked, you aren't upset that the founder of the company is making so much than you. But if you found out your fellow co-workers made more than you, you'd be pissed.
So the study is implying the inequality issue is more about people seeing other people their own level getting ahead rather than seeing the uber wealthy getting richer. I believe there are other studies in psychology with back this up. But whether you agree with the studies implications is up to you.
Another interesting note is that the people who are most upset at zuckerburg and the new tech billionaires are the elite wealthy whom they surpassed in wealth.
Well, it's still inequality. It's just not ine-quantity.
Each gets something different -- whether we perceive them as equal market value is not probably relevant to the monkey.
I confess I didn't get much out of my forays into Girard. It seems to mostly be amateur primatology. It's entirely possible I didn't try hard enough, or whatever Thiel got out of it, he got out of it in person rather than from the books. It's also possible Girard is overrated by Thiel fanboy types.
I don't think it helps the rest of us quite so much to view society through his preferred lens, though.
I’ve read most of Girard’s books and while I think they’re a good critique of both desire and the formation of religions, it has a great deal of shortcomings because of Girard’s retreat into theology. Instead of really tackling the problems his work raises, he simply sets it aside with something to the affect of “be a Christian,” (while nowhere acknowledging how modern Christianity has been weaponized to spread the kind of contagion and scapegoating his work sought to expose.)
I do think an understanding of Girard’s philosophy is necessary to understand Thiel’s political project. But I think he’s actually taken a quite dark lesson from Girard, allying himself with a new, scapegoating sacrificial order to attain further economic and political power.
Haven't noticed it, but then again I don't closely follow Thiel.
I do however have read Girard's work for 15 years now, and consider it important. Especially the "Things hidden since the foundations of the world" discussion (the title does not allude to some literal conspiracy theory - it's a quote from the New Testament, Matthew 13:35) made several things about the development of human societies, customs, political systems, and the role of religion and violence, click. (It's however a hefty tome 500+ pages iirc, in the form of a long disccusion/interview with 2 other academics).
>Not to mention that Girard's views on mimetic theory aren't that new to anyone who has kids and wants them to learn from others.
That doesn't dismiss Girard (or any thinker for that matter). When it comes to a thinker, what's important is not whether the surface idea or observation is new, but about how deep is is thought, and how much of its subtleties and variances they have covered.
Girard himself repeatedly gives tons of examples of his mimetic theory expressed in 3 millennia of texts, often not as a mere case of people expressing it without knowing it, but knowingly too.
These days you need to complete a top PhD before you can really either carry off the conceit or afford the magnanimity that the views of less educated people are not a threat to your social station.
STEM doesn't have this as much because if you don't have the maths, you really aren't part of the conversation and so there's no risk to your social status in fraternizing with the less-educated. Or as we cringingly (if not sickeningly) refer to them, "the left behind."
I'm of the view that the culture war is primarily an example of this "Girardian Terror," where in our good intentions we used the college system to create a whole new class of precarious and economically cornered ideologues equipped with nothing but resentment, and we're about to unleash them into our institutions.
This decade is going to be a trip. :)
I don't intend this as a criticism, but rather just an observation, that someone could see writing ability and communication capacity and cultural knowledge and assume a grad, and thus make these types of observations a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Naturally all of the above hone their skills with practice, but the great ones started from a different baseline.
I need people who I can trust to given presentations to clients, executives, or directors of other divisions of the business.
I need people who can communicate clearly in writing with clients/stakeholders.
I need people who can write good commit logs, comments, and technical documentation for other engineers.
In the extremely limit, I need people who can write a white paper or research paper.
I'm not looking for the next Dickens or Fitzgerald.
Taking you literally, I can't see any reason why greatness should be determined solely at birth.
I agree with this assessment. Even some top-tier CS programs seem to routinely graduate students with poor writing skills and sub-par cultural awareness.
I always recommend to interns that they take some writing-intensive courses, and possibly even pick up a minor in a writing-intensive field like English or Philosophy. And then not just take the course, but also use what they learned to write about things free time they way they (should be) writing code outside of their CS courses.
I think a lot of the strong disagreement in HN re: the value of college basically boils down to the huge amount of variety in the college experience.
Surprisingly, this variety has less to do with the quality of the institution and more to do with the quality/preparedness of the student.
A good litmus test for whether someone is wasting college might be to ask the question: what did you read/build/do this semester outside of your courses that used stuff you learned in your curses during the last year or so?
The less impressive the answer to that question, the more likely it is the student should maybe think about leaving college until they're ready to fully engage.
(Obviously, that litmus test only makes sense for full-time undergraduate students... for working students, it might be something more like "how are you using what you're learning in your day job".)
Possibly. But there is an enormous range of institutional quality, from diverse, not necessarily elite or even large, schools to the ones existing almost entirely to absorb GI bill and scholarship funding and maybe provide job training.
However, I would give you the reactionary view of campus politics, but even that seems separate and not 1:1 to the status anxiety of people who thought university would make them palpably elite.
A good friend talks about those. And he likes to go on long rants about the evils illegal immigrants. Pointing out that the lack of those workers would put a number of his best friends out of business doesn't help.
You're right, it's complex.
And, be honest, having a degree does open doors that are closed otherwise. A welder may make more money than a junior suit just out of college, but may forget that fact when he's working on a pipe outside in 40°F weather.
[0] https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literatur...
Ouch.
"Is it really true that all violence is a by-product of mimetic rivalry? Here’s the kind of situation Girard is asking us to imagine. Two men, Jimmy and Joey, stand beside a lake on a hot day. Jimmy decides to go for a swim. Joey, who would never have had this idea in his life, immediately decides to do likewise. Inevitably, this causes a death struggle between the two men as they fight over the lake."
...
"Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon—the resistance to contagion—more apparent than in the high chair at dinnertime. “Nothing is more mimetic,” declares Girard, “than the desire of a child.”[30] One wonders, has he ever met a child?[31] Has he ever tried to feed one a brussels sprout? “Yum yum,” we say, absurdly hoping that our desire for healthy food will carry over mimetically. “Blech,” says the child, unceremoniously spitting it out. You can’t get a child to want to eat brussels sprouts, because this kind of desire depends on liking, and children just don’t like brussels sprouts. They do not get all their desires from parents (even in such a wonderfully closed environment, with so little outside stimulus)."
...
"Let’s sum up: it is perfectly possible to form desires in the absence of a model (the pica sufferer’s yearning for dirt); it is perfectly possible, conversely, for others’ desires to leave us cold (the child’s stubborn disinclination toward brussels sprouts); the fact that we sometimes act on recommendations from admired friends and experts proves nothing, since we are entirely capable of ignoring them (Kill Bill 2, no thank you);[33] and the fact that there are always multiple potential models (brother Aron, brother David) strongly suggests that those potential models are not doing the choosing for us. In short, there is no basis at all to the central premise of Girardianism: that “human beings have no desires of their own,” that there is never a reason (objective or subjective) for wanting something rather than something else, that spontaneous impulses are an illusion, that autonomy is impossible."
...
"I’ve heard literary scholars say with a straight face that we wouldn’t have noticed mimetic desire in Stendhal had it not been for Girard; this is like saying we wouldn’t have noticed war in the Iliad, Christianity in Dostoevsky, memory in Proust, or adultery in Madame Bovary without the help of critics. It’s right there on the surface, as the central theme of Stendhal’s writing."
...
"When you pay attention, it is astonishing just how frequently he gets it wrong about the texts he is reading, just how relentlessly he continues pummeling square pegs into round holes. “It is not an exaggeration,” he claims at one point, “to say that, in all of the characters of Remembrance of Things Past, love is strictly subordinated to jealousy, to the presence of the rival.”[44] Allow me to propose a friendly amendment: it is an exaggeration to say that. Notoriously, the parents of Proust’s narrator—hardly insignificant figures—are entirely immune to jealousy. Even Charles Swann, who becomes a fanatically jealous lover, does not begin this way,[45] and the narrator is quite categorical that the new jealousy, far from constituting the essence of his passion, in fact represents a denaturing of that passion.[46] That’s why, when Swann ceases being jealous, he is nonetheless able to remain in love.[47]"
One wonders if Thiel and anyone else who professes to like Girard has noticed stages 3 and 4. (I don't know anything about Girard, but those two do seem to follow rather well stages 1 and 2, which are apparently valid judging by the original article.)
Allow me to add one piece: Girard comes close to refuting himself. Why? Because, if Girard is correct, then why do people believe Girard? Not because he is correct, but only because they are memetically infected by some model. And why did that model believe it? Same reason. Nobody believes it (or anything) on the basis of the actual truthfulness of the idea.
And then, where did Girard get it? Not from a careful examination of the evidence, but because he was memetically infected by some model. So it's not original, and it's not based on evidence.
So if it's true, it destroys our ability to know whether anything is actually true, including itself. That is pretty strong grounds to not believe it, in my book.
If I was interested in a psychological depiction of what it's like to be a pretentious business major with a keen interest in analyzing Game of Thrones and kissing Peter Thiel's ass, I think this might have a good deal of merit.
I wonder if this is just elitism looking down on the great unwashed masses. I confess that my own initial reaction was to agree with the claim, then start composing a comment about how I was different from the others. But I, as much as anyone else, need to be careful not to stereotype a whole group of people.
One reason that Girardian conflict is attractive is that the differences aren't big enough to ensure different destinies. Rivals in college can put each other down, CS geeks insulting math geeks, knowing that their likely outcomes in life are broadly similar. Putting down, say, a subsistence farmer, who does have a different destiny, would seem quite cruel.
Girardian conflict doesn't feel like elitism. Marxist conflict does.
"René Girard’s most famous student did not take the threat of mimetic contagion lightly when he ran a company. When Peter Thiel was the CEO of PayPal, he tried to minimize mimetic contagion, possibly because the company was hiring a bunch of kids who’ve been socialized in elite colleges. Keith Rabois has recounted that as a manager,
Thiel allowed everyone to work on one thing and one thing only.
Rabois couches in terms of ridding distractions, but it’s clear that this is good Girardian practice. People will not feel mimetic envy if they cannot look at the work of others.
And:
"Thiel’s comments on management more generally are worth reading. The Girardian themes are clear if one looks for them: “If you were a sociopathic boss who wanted to create trouble for your employees, the formula you would follow would be to tell two people to do the exact same thing. That’s a guaranteed formula for creating conflict. If you’re not a sociopath, you want to be very careful to avoid this.”"
I think the author is right though, it's true zero sum competitions that make enemies and the only person I've ever thought of as an enemy was a "friend" that my ex constantly visited at night before breaking up with me.
I myself had to retake 3 classes and I have been advising a worried parent whose son is currently at Purdue majoring in CS because he is now having to retake a 4th class and he is only a junior.
I went to a far less prestigious school that you've never heard of. There were some people not passing classes in my cs major, but it was rare, almost unheard of after the first year. After I got to grad school I realized in comparison my undergrad wasn't that challenging. If I had failed a class or even gotten a C in undergrad it would have been pretty devastating. I was the top student in the dept (not bragging, I'm sure at mit or another great school I would have been far from the top ;-)).
When I went to grad school to get my phd (at a much better school) it was much more challenging, and I wasn't at the top like I was in undergrad. People did struggle a lot more than at my undergrad school. I was still a good student, I thought. But I also didn't see the undergrads retaking classes where it was a semi-common thing.
In my experience (CS at CMU), it's the undergrad years that are the most brutal and require the most (assuming you strive for excellence and not just passing).
I've had friends and coworkers who went to MIT, Caltech and Stanford pretty much agree with this. Those of us who continued to graduate and postgraduate studies, have (generally) found the "mental effort" - not time investment - far reduced.
[1] Mark Tarver has written a great essay on this: http://www.marktarver.com/professor.html
Another motivating aspect is that it’s “easier” to attack and defeat a nearly equal rival than it is to defeat a much stronger enemy. For example, people attack the weaker and poorer than themselves much more readily than they attack their actual common enemy: the very rich. Instead, most people are bitterly divided-and-conquered, ensconced in their separate, partisan echo-chambers, accomplishing nothing. This is not to say adversarial partisanship doesn’t have its place: two or more strong parties function as countervailing powers to prevent either from gaining an upper hand. These days however, when corruption is too extreme and too hedged, the major parties become different flavors of tools of the rich.
Furthermore, when the established order appears weak or imploding, people tend to move more naturally to the extremes of right and left, seeking utopian solutions and populist demagogues.
What’s this means is that Marx was, inconveniently, correct about reality of concentrated wealth and greed’s externalities but subsequent splintering factions that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t necessarily correct about the prescriptions. These days people must realize that “a house divided cannot stand” and that vampiric billionaires have bought most governments and mass media to such an extent that they are extincting species at an incredible rate, doubling-down on climate change and causing a widening gulf of inequality that hasn’t been seen in a century. People who are relatively comfortable or are in destructive industries will do everything to reinforce their cognitive dissonance and destroy those who challenge them with inconvenient reality.
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...
It's definitely something I see in the world, in my own behavior at times. But it's not my only motivation in life. I have things I like to do that no one else around me does, internal motivation. I'm hopefully not doing them in some subconscious comparison to others that exist a 1,000 miles away. My interest in certain unproved math. problems, or space research, or porn, or skiing or cats or whatever - I can have my own desires. I don't buy it that intrinsically I am unlikely to have no uniqueness.
Some left the UK and the Netherlands as those countries where to liberal in terms of freedom of religion.