Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

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Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics. You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telling this one story over and over again, a story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem.

The system, lol, I mean our culture and society, is very resilient to change. If it wasn't, it would be a different system. A part of the resilience, the reason it doesn't crash down into chaos and anarchy is because it rejects and ostracizes people with new ideas. It's by design, how it evolved. However, it also needs to evolve and grow and the people who do that have to endure.

Not all people who are on this 'Hero's Journey' are correct. Disney isn't addressing whether the crazy new idea is good or not, although in their media it is always a good idea, which is what Paul Graham is writing about. Their stories are addressing the journey a person endures if they have any crazy new idea that challenges their culture and society, good or bad. Whereas, Paul Graham is looking to quantify signals that a crazy new idea is good, something he should invest in. To which, I'd add asking if the person with a crazy new idea is honest, not only to other people, but more importantly honest to themselves, integrity. If a person can separate delusion from fact except for that one idea, that's a signal.

[0]https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...

I think Campbell's "journey" is about storytelling and the narrative journey, with a heavy dose of Jungian psychology, not about tech/science ideas. So I'd say it doesn't fit here.

That's the part that screenwriters often talk about. But his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, covers more than that and there are insights applicable to being a scientist.

A key insight is that mythology's interpersonal structures are special to people, and our minds are wired to see them everywhere. A neuro-Bayesian might call them a prior. As a result, if your role in society somewhat resembles an archetype, the public is likely to perceive you mostly or entirely in terms of that archetype.

Scientists are at risk of being pattern-matched to the Daedalus archetype. The public will ascribe all sorts of Daedalus-nature to you (even those who don't recognize the name) and you'll wonder "Why would they assume all those things about me???".

The book may shed some light what's going on and how to deal with it.

Interesting! I didn't read that book but a book derived from it, by Christopher Booker, titled Why We Tell Stories. I disliked much of it, it was very pretentious and reductionist and went as far as to suggest stories which deviate from the hero's journey are somehow flawed.

Maybe I should go to the source, thanks for pointing out there's more to it.

Newton's law of universal gravitation is quite useful even if not fully accurate. Psychologically and sociologically people especially children need to be informed and inherit a tradition which is done through story telling. Campbell points out that humans haven't changed physiologically in the last 10,000 years, what has changed are the traditions passed down by story telling. Contained in myths is more than how to tell a captivating and compelling story but also how to use symbolism, perhaps a more direct language than words. He says the myths, which people carry in their memory and thoughts as they go about their lives, serve four main functions. The first is dealing with the mystery of the universe and the human condition. Then it has a cosmological function to describe the universe and phenomena such as thunder and lightning which we now do with science. It has a sociological function informing people how to behave and act in their society and culture. And, lastly, a pedagogical function. Perhaps one day we can explain the mind and consciousness with neurology but like Newton's law, spirituality, symbolism, and mythology is very useful today.

In the context of Disney's use of mythological symbolism in their story telling, it has everything to do with tech/science. When children repeatedly watch movies like Marvel's Black Panther and pretend to be the character by dressing up, the characters become that child's identity. When they are faced with new situations like going to a new school or having to deal with bullying, they are informed how to deal with the situation by the memory of the story. In the Black Panther there is a fictional highly technologically advanced nation called Wakanda. This isn't just about telling a compelling story, it is deliberate informing girls especially girls of African decent of what their relation to the society they are born into is. The character Shuri is Head of the Science and Information Exchange. Someone at Disney decided to put a black woman in charge and this is the sociological function of the myth watched by hundreds of millions of children all around the Earth. That is a crazy new idea.

One thing these girls who grew up to become scientists will have to face is after investing 4 years in college and another 4 in graduate school they likely will be discriminated against because of the color of their skin or being female. The hero's journey is one of several mythological plots and it is the one these girls will need to be informed with at that point in order to prevent complete psychological breakdown when they face that challenge. Anyone with a crazy new idea whether it is in engineering, science, making movies based on comic books, music, or literature will have a similar journey.

I feel like Godwin saying this, but the other side of that coin is that's the same process that Joachim Feist's biography describes Hitler as going through.

You might be a Skywalker, but you don't know which one.

Similarly, I was going to say it's the story of Thanos.

"story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem"

Also, Erich Fromm's, a German psychoanalyst, 'Escape from Freedom' which is a social psychology treatise on the rise of Nazism published in 1941 about how people innately shirk responsibility and the relationship between a person's freedom to make decisions and how much social and personal responsibility they assume.

The book is about how Hitler came to power but what I saw was a manual on how to become a very evil person. I remember thinking halfway through the book, 'Oh, this is why negging is a very effective seduction technique.'

(I looked up the word assume to make sure I'm using it correctly here and even in its definition power and responsibility are interchangeable which makes sense because there is a relationship in our reality between power and responsibility. Strangely, Fromm didn't use the word shirk in this context, I think I get that word from Dr. Seuss' 'Horton Hears a Who'. Probably a good thing that Dr. Seuss got to me first. That is the wisdom of the Disney folks.)

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