I read a book that blew my mind a little | Hacker News Reader

I read a book that blew my mind a little

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135 pointslxm89 comments

Don’t feel like playing the twitter bait game?

> The book is called ‘Wanting’, by an guy named Luke Burgis.

Annoying “teaser” title on this post which leads to the usual annoying twitter thread, where in this case the name of the book which blew his mind a little is actually named.

Incidentally, where exactly does blowing one’s mind “a little” rank? Is that more or less than “enlightened me”?

This combination of dumbing down and gaming communication is growing more popular, and it is making us worse humans.

Dude, chill out. That's just the format of Twitter, which is limited with N characters per post. Of course the author could have just written in a different medium, and link his blog, but you know how short the attention span of people these days. What's relevant is the message, it doesn't have to be written like an Economist or a New Yorker article

>Of course, none of these desires relate in any way to your personal happiness or true desires.

This is where it lost me. I can't agree with this statement.

Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them. The natural response, of course, is to choose the people in your life, as well as be aware of the pros and cons of having those people in your life.

Most people who have a big impact on the world don't do it alone. They surround themselves by people who help them make that impact. This can be done intentionally. You can choose the "social norms" in your life, simply by changing who you're surrounded by.

So, no, I can't agree with the statement quoted above, for the simple reason that I can (and do) choose the people who influence me. (As do most people, at least to a certain extent.)

Do people choose who they're surrounded by? Of course!

Should people make these choices more consciously? Of course!

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 theory. You notice that when you read their works, as their characters behave in a way that is just too consistent with mimetism for it to be a coincidence. Girard was simply the first to explicitly explain the theory and work it out.

Lastly, although I, like so many others, discovered mimetism by myself when I was a teenager, Girards books were still very enlightening to me. He takes a pretty trivial theory, but works it out very thoroughly and draws a lot of insightful conclusions from it.

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 quite communicate. If mimetic theory seems silly, I think it's worth reading it from Girard, rather than from primates such as myself, chattering incoherently about happened in their head when they read his ideas.

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

Start with some online summaries. Girard's theories span multiple essays and books. Instead of jumping straight into one of his books, it will help to get some overall context.

I personally read "The Scapegoat" but Girard is doing literary critique which, like philosophy, can be dense and difficult to read if one isn't used to such texts. Personally, I would like to read "Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure" sometime in the future.

Diamond and black pearl are good example where "savvy" people want them because others do. Modern days, bitcoin and all those altcoins would be the same. One own happiness of these "savvy" people depends on how others perceive

That 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.

> almost certain those who write these either are virgins, or write them for virgins.

Come on. People like being liked. Even if it's superficially, in a way that wouldn't work if they get to know the "true you", it's fun to be respected. There are some caveats (most people don't want paparazzi-level fame, imposter syndrome sucks, etc.).

I like being the local bash expert in my peer group, even though realistically it just means more work for me because I have to help other people with weird shell problems. Competency is respected, and people like being respected.

Maybe you don't agree, but I don't think your opinions generalize.

It'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.

It is hard.. My take is that you can't solve it, and shouldn't try to as it's effectively impossible. It's better to accept our minds nature and that we postfacto rationalize 99% of our decisions rather than rationally decide them. Instead accept it, and use that 1% that we do rationally decide to influence how you want the rest, including ambitions or emotional desires, to be over time. I mean, we're all basically toddlers on an emotional level, but with more sophisticated wrappings.

I feel I have, however, you may be able to prove me wrong. :-) I propose having a conversation on the subject. :-) Email in my profile. Pls. reach out if you would like to. Thanks.

You are a program optimized to increase human biomass.

That’s literally all that’s happening.

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.

You 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.

  > 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.

i feel like we have developed in the modern world a kind of junk-food culture....

it doesn't provide much nutrition, so we get hungry again and eat more, we feel better for a short while, then we need it again... great for sales, maybe not great for you

The problem is that going against it, while noble, is like swimming against the current of a tsunami. A single actor can't change how society works, and has to obey the laws of that society.

Is the point to change how society works or just to recognize it and not let it change how you work?

The only way to achieve that is to live as an outcast, which is generally a much less preferable situation to be in.

I'm confused. Is the thesis just that: peer pressure is real?

It's a little subtler than that: peers don't just influence to do things, they influence you to want things.

That's still just the normal definition of peer pressure.

I think of peer pressure as doing something to conform or as something explicit your peer group wants you to do. If one of your friends gets a Tesla, they probably don't want you to get a Tesla. If everyone gets one, it doesn't make them stand out anymore, it's the new baseline.

Peer pressure is overweight friends subtly trying to prevent you from losing weight because it makes them feel more bad about their weight. Peer pressure is friends convincing you some trip or experience will be worth it and you should come with them. I don't think of peer pressure as keeping up with the Joneses (but you are right that we already have a phrase for this phenomenon).

I mean, wikipedia defines peer pressure as:

"Peer pressure is the direct or indirect influence on people of peers, members of social groups with similar interests, experience, or social status. Members of a peer group are more likely to influence a person's beliefs and behavior. A group or individual may be encouraged and want to follow their peers by changing their attitudes, values or behaviors to conform to those of the influencing group or individual"

I think that keeping up with the jones very much fits into that.

No, no. It's this new thing I invented.

You should write a book on this that inverts, expands, and deconstructs this idea over the course of 300 or so pages with a bunch of questionable anecdotes, historical narrative, and pseudoscience analysis.

>>they influence you to want things

This is a frequent topic of stress in my life. It's almost every other week, my cousin and his family show up at our home and make it a point to rub their latest purchase in our faces.

Some times my wife and mom even fall for it.

My typical approach is to let a week to a month pass between such an incident and for most purchases you realise you don't need it. Eventually you do come across a few things which they buy, and could improve your life and it make sense buying them. But giving a wait period generally helps to see if that is the case.

I also feel bad for my cousin that his happiness depends on staying in debt forever buying things just to show off.

Yeah, I don't get it. Most people work this out in high school.

We all still fall into the trap sometimes, and being constantly bombarded with ads doesn't help.

Yep. Feels like this was a test of a click bait title more than a meaningful submission to HN.

No, because the influence isn’t necessarily peers.

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 provide.

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.

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.

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!

there are tools that turn long tweets into multiple tweets. such as : https://www.twitlonger.com/

actually thats not a great example sorry.

but FYI it looks like he was using this service: https://hypefury.com/

I think it's pretty obvious given how popular these types of threads are that Twitter does provide a mean to present them in chronological order.

It's less about the format, and more about discoverability.

IIRC (got banned from twitter for 'bot like activity' first time I replied to Elon Musk): Pressing "Enter" sends the tweet, so it's pretty natural to just keep typing more posts.

Amazing and completely new way to think about the world or the universe! I got a really good name for this ultra new concept! We should call it "peer pressure"!!

Honestly reading this twitter I just rolled my eyes. He discovered peer pressure and gave it a pretentious name. This is nothing new, people have been talking about the emptiness of modern society and climbing the endless corporate ladder for decades and decades.

Let me tell you the real answer and this is literally the biggest joke ever: You are not designed to be happy. You are designed to be continuously unsatisfied always seeking to fulfill something that can never be fulfilled until you grow old and die. Why are we like this? Natural Selection.

A perfectly content human does not take the actions necessary to aid in survival. A content human does not work or compete. Thus the humans that survived the filter of natural selection are all humans that have some sort of innate desire to never be satisfied to always want more. One of the ways we unconsciously create voids we need to fill is to compare ourselves with our peers.

There are so many theories like this ("all human behavior is explained by mimetic desire" or "mimetic desire is the primary driver of human behavior," replace "mimetic desire" with X). They're all convincing and there's no shortage of evidence for each of them.

But there can't be many things that are "the primary driver of human behavior". This leaves these theories in an awkward position: "mimetic desire explains everything" is mind-blowing but clearly wrong whereas "mimetic desire is one factor among many" is a truism.

I am 90% through Wanting and it has also blown my mind. I knew a little about mimetic desire, but not the ins and outs as Girard thought about it.

The book pushed me to sell me “dream” car that I recently purchased and has me longing for a simpler life focused less on things that I want do to mimesis.

I don’t think mimesis is bad, but I when it’s used to coerce you to live a certain way or do certain things for the benefit of someone else it feels like you don’t have control. Which is the really mind blowing thing about this theory, that we don’t have control.

I must be inoculated against this wanting disease because if everyone wants something, I have a visceral desire to avoid it. This is especially true with travel where I avoid all popular sites or destinations. I also don’t celebrate holidays, listen to obscure music, live in an atypical city for tech workers, invited no one to my wedding except a witness, studied German instead of business or comp sci and list goes on. However, maybe it’s an inverse of wanting. Maybe I want those popular things but don’t choose them bc others have.

> I have a visceral desire to avoid it.

That could easily be defined as mimetism nonetheless.

You may genuinely have benefited from this very popular thing, but you opted out because of your fellow humans' behavior.

Even if the outcome is opposite to typical mimetism, the process is similar.

> Of course, none of these desires relate in any way to your personal happiness or true desires.

This is where I stopped reading, because of course the most egregious false generalization typically starts with words like “of coruse”, “it is easy to see”, “obviosly” etc.

What is surprising about people wanting to fit in with one another? There is nothing new about monkey see monkey do.

Right, nothing new. But every now and then it is a good reminder to see things a bit more clearly. When you want something, it is powerful to be able to pause and realize the wanting arises because of what others do, not intrinsically.

So delightful to read in the Twitter format. But I guess that's what you need to do to fit in.

It’s not necessarily driven by fitting in which infers liking the same things other like so you are in the “in group”. It’s preferring things just because others do, no reward of “in group” membership required.

It's one of those unseen realities (or banal platitudes as Foster Wallace said) of everyday life. How's the water, boys? said the old fish.

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.

Peter 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.

He said Peter "popularized" it, not invented.

He didn’t popularize it either.

He popularized it in tech circles where people all read from the same basket of 5 pop science books.

What's in the basket?

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 actually noticed how much joy I got from driving it and said that I'm driving it for myself which stood out. For the record, convertibles are in a separate category and everyone likes seeing one in the summer with the top down and tunes cranking. It did all sort itself out anyway as I still as always have itches to scratch and challenging new things to learn and discover.

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

I'm not so sure about that.

I suppose that's for genres and volume levels within reason. I was getting smiles all around.

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/bmw-drivers-voted-the-worst-drive...

If you are shoving your music in people's ears then you can turn up that hate a notch.

As a defence against "mimetism", probably we should do what Warren Buffett did : He talks about NOT living in NY or near Wall Street probably as a way to defend against this influence of others [0]. While we can't all go away and live someplace else, at least it's worth trying to get away from things to get perspective .

“It’s very easy to think clearly here. You’re undisturbed by irrelevant factors and the noise generally of business investments,” Buffett said. “If you can’t think clearly in Omaha, you’re not going to think clearly anyplace.”

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/warren-buffett-berkshire-...

See also Walter Benjamin's short piece "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933)[1]. In short: "...language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic."

1. http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Benjamin-4-22-Mimetic%20Faculty.pdf

I'm a freelancer, so I can always choose not to work. I'm not budgeting a fixed salary, but rather deciding how much of my time I sell. Having to choose between free time and nice things tends to make what I want crystal clear.

For instance, I'd like a faster motorcycle, but I'd also like taking 3 months off. The cost is roughly the same. I could spend those 3 months riding my current motorcycle.

This is the force that counters my desire to keep up with the Joneses.

The book is called ‘Wanting’, by an guy named Luke Burgis.

Nobody seems to have noticed (yet) that this wisdom was in the Bible already... So I'll be the one to point it out:

1. The one walking with the wise will become wise, But the one who has dealings with the stupid will fare badly (Proverbs 13:20).

2. Do not become unevenly yoked (2 Corinthians 6:14).

We do as we see others do, and we feel inclined to buy/travel/achieve as we see others buy/travel/achieve... So it is important to match yourself up with someone who is at least sort-of in the same ballpark (achieving realistic goals) and can be considered "wise" (as in: being able to apply knowledge).

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.

Not at all. We might be interested in slightly different metrics in Europe, but the difference is minimal. Maybe you and your click of friends have distinctly anti-materialistic values, but then some people can't help to casually mention how much time they idly spent most of their weekend strolling in the forest, and someone else suddenly feels a small pain of regret for wasting their weekend by reading or turning their compost.

In Europe the metrics are simply different. I've seen people care a great deal about how much they travel, that score postgrads use to measure each other, how nice their flat is, and so on. We're just the same, albeit a little more debt-averse.

I'm honestly tired of seeing mimesis and mimetic desire associated with Peter Thiel. Why is Thiel even mentioned?... To get twitter tech bro clicks?

Girard was a literary scholar who focused on myths and mimetic desire was just one part of his analysis of mythical or narrative texts. The other large part of his analysis is related to the scapegoat and how it is the "mortar" for building communal and religious social structures. Certainly read some of his essay collections or even one of his longer books. At the very least read a summary online.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451256182329548802.html

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/awilkinson/status/145125618232954...

Thoughts:

* Presumably everything starts as an extrinsic desire (when we are born). What is process of an extrinsic desire becoming intrinsic?

* If we figure out this process does that mean we can transform every extrinsic desire into an intrinsic desire and thus make our success chances higher?

* If so, how do we choose which desires we would want as intrinsic?

If you are interested in this sort of thing I’d highly suggest reading The Spectacle of Society by Guy Debord. Or just read the first paragraph which summarizes the book in its entirety:

The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation between people mediated by images.

Nitpick: it's 'The Society of the Spectacle' for anyone looking.

Rene 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...

Keeping up with the Joneses.

One of the reasons why so many iPhones are sold and people drink beer even though it tastes like piss to some of them. Hey it’s “craft” beer must be something special about it.

Somebody took the 10th Commandment and blew it out into a full-on book.

Smart work.

So, at what point exactly becomes a motivation to do something intrinsic? The moment the 'I' forgets its origin and history and attributes it all to itself?

Armchair psychology but probably when 4 of the 5 in Maslow's hierarchy of needs are met [0] ?

[0] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-maslows-hierarchy-of-ne...