Mimetic Traps | Hacker News Reader

Mimetic Traps

briantimar.com

62 pointsherbertl27 comments

I agree with a lot of this article, but much of the suggested action at the end strikes me as flawed.

> Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.

I'd moderate this a bit. Maybe, "If you are forcing yourself to do what you hate, step back and think: is the goal worth the slog to me?"

> Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-financial rewards.

This is the worst, to me. Purely financial motivation is one of the surest ways to be trapped in a role you hate. Make sure what you do offers you personal and social rewards that you value.

> Join Twitter — there’s no better way to reduce tunnel vision.

Twitter is the most awful social-pressure tool ever created. Please, I beg of you, do not join Twitter!

I came here to post the same comment about financial compensation.

Focusing on money is just another mimetic trap (though one with very nice side effects). There are a lot of dudes in our demographic hitting their thirties and realizing in despair that they are financially comfortable and yet their life feels utterly empty and meaningless.

The best metric I know to avoid this trap is that the things I spend my time on should scratch at least one of:

1. Be relaxing, enjoyable, or personally rewarding. It should help me recharge and unwind to prepare for the rest of this list.

2. Gain or improve a useful skill that I can then apply to the last item on this list.

3. Benefit other people.

In other words, be healthy so that I can be effective so that I can be helpful. When I stay centered on this (without obsessing about it), I'm generally happy with how I spend my time.

> Twitter is the most awful social-pressure tool ever created.

Twitter, perhaps to a larger degree than any other social network, is whatever you make it into. Yes, if you follow a bunch of hustle-culture drones (or people who retweet that), your feed will make you miserable. Follow different people and you'll get a totally different Twitter. My feed is generally nourishing, supportive, and rewarding, though it takes fairly frequent gardening to keep it such.

I focus on money now, in early/mid career, so that in the future I'll have total freedom to do whatever I want.

Then the odds are good that you are already falling into the mimetic trap I'm describing.

The article describes mimetic trap as "it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go".

Being able to retire at the middle of the career sounds like the opposite of that.

Two observations:

1. A lot of people who focus on their financial ability to retire early get so obsessed about the feelings of financial security that comes from that level of income that they are unable to give it up even when they probably could retire.

The parent commenter says, "total freedom to do whatever I want" but there is no level of wealth that gives you "total freedom". No matter what, there is always a potential calamity of sufficient power to knock you down. But the more you lock yourself into the mindset of "I just need to have enough money to prepare for anything" the less you are able to gain the resilience needed to actually be happy now.

2. I think you're equating "money" with "somewhere to go". It's certainly true that wealth gives you options. But if the goal is to ultimately feel satisfied with your life, then having many things you can afford to buy none of which make you happy can put you exactly in the position where you have "nowhere to go".

The time you spend focusing on earning money is time not spent figuring out what choices are actually deeply rewarding to you. And knowing the answer to the latter is critical if you want to know where to go.

Will you, or will the urge to make more take over? I don't know you, so I can't assume, but I've heard a lot more people talk about retiring at 40 than do it when they could.

>> Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-financial rewards.

> This is the worst, to me. Purely financial motivation is one of the surest ways to be trapped in a role you hate. Make sure what you do offers you personal and social rewards that you value.

Money is fungible for a great many things in life- the risk you take working for other things (ideals, status, etc) is that, if you become disillusioned, you're left with nothing.

This has happened to friends of mine in social work. They believed they could make a difference, went through all the hoops, kept up with the continuing education and licensing requirements (not covered by the state, obviously) and after years completely disillusioned from the bureaucracy and human nature.

> the risk you take working for other things (ideals, status, etc) is that, if you become disillusioned, you're left with nothing. > This has happened to friends of mine in social work.

Yes. Worse, after that many years working (e.g. in social work) for ideals|status|etc., whatever other employable skills (e.g. coding) that you may have had has now atrophied.

Even if you kept up your skills in your own time, you still have this long employment "gap" to get over in your job hunt / resume / interviewing.

So if you become disillusioned, you're left with nothing, and might now be stuck continuing to work in that disillusionment (to put food on the table).

Joining/using Twitter is in direct conflict with the first goal of "Don't force yourself to do anything you hate"

> Join Twitter — there’s no better way to reduce tunnel vision.

Maybe this is a slight over-reaction, but if a person made that recommendation I would view everything else they said with strong suspicion. How can a mind go so wrong that they think that's good advice? Even seemingly sensible advice from that person would merit extra scrutiny, because of the tainted source.

I agreed with all his points but the Twitter one.

Alternatively I would propose to work a job in a wildly different field for a few months, for example waiting tables, in a grocery or at a recycling company. Your horizon will be exploded by the people you meet and work with.

I've found twitter to be a kind of mimetic testing ground where you can put your mastery of certain mimetic forces to the test. Not sure what the ultimate test is, I think it might be to quit completely, but without skipping the test of becoming a user -- there's a lot to be learned in going through that wringer.

I think I may have the opposite problem. I have contrarian tendencies. I have a strong natural desire to argue against group consensus. When I see too many people agreeing about something to the point that they're not really thinking anymore, I have to take the opposite side. I also generally dislike the kinds of people who always jump on the latest social bandwagon and support the current thing. I can't stand people who can't think for themselves and yet are aggressive when it comes to spreading whatever ideas authority figures have managed to implant into their minds.

It makes no sense to me why someone would spend so much energy and invest so much of their ego into an idea which not only they didn't come up with but which they haven't even bothered to analyze from first principles.

It disturbs me that people can be at once so malleable to the will of authority figures and yet so rigid and stubbornly resistant to basic reasoning.

Mimesis is one side of a coin, it seems like contrarian tendency is the other. They both involve you making a little theory-of-mind for each of your friends/enemies/associates. To the point, it disturbs you that people are malleable and/or unreasonable, but why do you care at all?

I just wondered. Because you are a rando on the internet, and I constructed a model of your mind, and I don't quite understand it.

I care because, as a rational agent (or at least someone who aims to be), group-think affects me negatively when the group develops a dominant ideology which risks to infringe on my personal rights or take away opportunities from me sooner or later. I also believe that these dominant ideologies are harmful to the group and most of its honest/rational members.

It's important that members of the group keep an open mind so that the group doesn't become dogmatic. That's why I try to make contrarian arguments.

Blind copying is highly adaptive behavior and is the engine of human culture. Inventing things and reasoning correctly is really difficult, and copying widely adopted behaviors is usually much safer and more efficient.

Reading 'Not by Genes alone' really changed my perspective on this and helped me understand the blind copying as a very successful heuristic that sometimes gets things wrong.

The book "actionable gamification" talks about different sources of "core motivation". The author gives 8 typical sources, of which "social reinforcement" iirc, is one. (I found them all quite poorly named).

In any case, they provide a lens on building productive and rewarding systems. One observation is that these "extrinsic" motivators, alone, leave people unhappy (but engaged, until they arent).

What we appear to have here is a "social proof addiction trap", in the manner in which gambling is a "curiosity addiction trap".

This also speaks to a certain lack of inspiration/creativity. A lot of people who end up in graduate school are great at following a prescribed academic path and getting good grades etc. but when confronted with the prospect of original research might find themselves lacking. A lot of top scientists, like the great artists, writers etc. can't help themselves but think about or work on their field. Grothendieck disappeared to live in a cottage, but still produced thousands of page of handwritten notes of highly original mathematics.

Is there any explanation for the frequent Rene Girard references on HN besides the influence of Peter Thiel? It's odd. I'm not all that familiar with his work but in most circles you're probably more likely to see names like Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, et al.

There's a good (and short) book about the history of Silicon Valley cultural and philosophical influences that I found quite interesting:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374721237/whattechcallsth...

> I arrived at a simple mechanism: an excessive sensitivity to the desires of others, and a competitive environment.

> ...you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable.

Did the author just play themselves?

I feel the article sort of over-analyzes a fairly common process that happens to many people as they become adults and figure themselves out.

Virtually nobody knows what the fuck they are doing when they are 21 years old. You simply don't have the life experience yet, what you have is what other people have told you or showed you. If they're doing something that makes sense, it's by sheer accident.

As you get older, you get more experience, and figure out what you value; and consequently can re-evaluate your course in life and hopefully correct.

The competitiveness and status striving are what drove me out of academia. I wanted to be there because I liked playing with ideas. It was the people who were driven there by their competitive impulse that poisoned it for me. That and the zero-sum nature of the game: the overproduction of candidates for a fixed number of positions, which forced everyone into the same mindset, where you'd be lucky if in the end you landed with a job in some place you'd rather not be mostly doing stuff other than what you wanted to do in the first place.

Your current job/profession/career can be seen as an investment to your dreams.

You can find meaning in just about anything if you try hard enough.

Getting on twitter is the opposite of avoiding the mimetic trap though.

[2019], the twitter list is gone...

This thread: HN tries to decide if slurping up mindless insipid Paul Graham blogspam drivel and then posting rambling blogs and comments about self fulfilment is actually fulfilling.

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