Very Important People | Hacker News Reader

Very Important People

dirt.fyi

37 pointsgmays32 comments

I don't think I'm completely oblivious to social status, but I've never understood at a deep level the way most people seem to process concepts like "fame" and "celebrity". I have never had the experience of being awestruck by a person, or elevating them above personhood, though I admire plenty of people. With the few brushes with, maybe we can say "microcelebrity" I've had myself, the opportunities and status benefits, while nice, seemed not worth the bizarre distorting effect on social reality it has, like the thing where someone's heard of me and talks to me like they know me when we've never met is uncomfortable at best, and most people considered various degrees of famous I've met who I came to respect seemed to be similarly jaded with this awestruck or even worshipful reaction some people seem to have when they idolize someone. I really think this whole cluster of behaviors is unhealthy and weird, and the fact that mass-communication technologies and the massive societal resources bent toward persuasion (both commercial and political) have drastically amplified it is probably one of the major causal factors in the polycrisis of the modern world

Celebrity is a commercial, political, and creative 'hack' for mass media – which isn't always unhealthy to consume e.g. good books, films, music, etc.

I agree some people take it way too far, but I personally don't have a problem if Oprah promotes an important novel I wrote.

This is a phenomenon that, like many social phenomena, seems to scale superlinearly, and you've described a gradient of economic advantage along which this will tend to accelerate. These properties suggest to me that an attitude like "it's fine as long as it's not taken too far" is at best pretty naive

Schelling points are a known outcome of many types of phenomena, especially competitive ones.

This statement is, while true, quite vacuous. What's your point?

Dealing with reality.

"Like most unfamous people, I feel compelled to meet as many famous people as I can."

Is this how people are, or how LLMs think people are like?

Envy is worth talking about. It seems to pull a lot of people, like one of the strings in string theory. They want to be envied so they live an exhibitionist life, or they were surpassed by someone they thought was their equal and now they hate the gap. Is it possible people who feel envy then decide to be more exhibitionist, so they can be envied in the future?

I wonder what value envy provided to evolution? Did it motivate primates to do more than they are already doing? Is it a by-product of social status behaviors?

> by-product of social status behaviors

I think that's the one. There's entire rituals to show social status. For example, weddings. That's all it is for.

Weddings are also a social commitment exercise to the couple. Imagine if you had break a promise you made in front of everyone both of you know, after spending a whole lot of money. It’s loss aversion and social shame that possibly made a lot of couples stick together. Even so, posing with your best clothes, food, locations, entertainment and donning all of your jewelry (all of your wealth in gold in some country) does likely play the Envy string too.

on an individual, or societal pov, i heavily doubt this is the case... it might be true in some subsets of some societies (royalty? maybe, not sure), or maybe in some periods of times. but this view seems extremely reductive.

I felt the potato throwing. The primate in me agrees. The potato makes us all the same again.

Excellent read

It one nicely written text. I enjoyed being in the head of the author.

So they saw something that could be a person drowning and did nothing about it?

No one seems to notice so it’s probably a bouy.

> Before she started playing, she took a second to explain how love is in the air and in the trees and in the water. "And we're all, like, made out of water, you know!" she said. "And water is, like, you know, life!" It was one of the stupider things I'd heard recently, but it sounded familiar.

It’s one thing to be a blogger huffing his own farts, it’s another thing to be rude about it. The girl might not have been a philosopher, but when she was given a platform she said what she had to say; when the author of this article was given a platform he used it to publish a pointless, meandering essay operating under the erroneous belief that he was a good storyteller with insightful things to say.

By leaving out the following paragraph you're doing an injustice, framing a humorous anecdote as an attack:

>Then I remembered that I'd heard it before. A homeless guy had been saying this exact same thing down by the beach, although I had to admit the message benefited from the wireless microphone, the giant festival stage, and the thousands of screaming fans.

It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.

The author of this article is a solid storyteller who brings in a number of human elements that make it compelling. Meandering storytelling is intentional - this isn't an article for a scientific journal.

> It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.

It’s not a poignant observation. This is the issue I had with the entire article; it was an uninsightful, unoriginal tweet that the author dragged out into more than two dozen paragraphs.

> The author of this article is a solid storyteller

I disagree. He’s using formulaic creative writing methods and came across as pretentious.

> Meandering storytelling is intentional

The meandering added nothing to the story. You summarized the entire post in less than a paragraph.

Writing isn't always about terse summaries of information. If you want that, have an LLM summarize it.

Good writing expresses concepts and ideas in engaging ways. You could write a few paragraphs summarizing theology, philosophy, and family dynamics that could be read in 10 minutes, but that doesn't come close to matching or replacing Dostoyevsky.

Doing everything as efficiently as possible misses the point. It's similar to how handwritten notes are slower but are retained more because of the process and taking the time to make them and read them.

> You could write a few paragraphs summarizing theology, philosophy, and family dynamics that could be read in 10 minutes, but that doesn't come close to matching or replacing Dostoyevsky.

The author of the post is not Dostoyevsky. My objection is not to meandering, it’s to the meandering done by those who have nothing worthwhile to say.

You missed the point of this text. It is not a scientific article, nor text pretending to be a revelation in any way. It is just a process or the episode of life, the author shared with us. And the writing (style) is excellent too.

I find this kind of attitude insufferable to be honest. This is really hard to read.

“I've seen almost zero famous people in my life.“

What is the point of this article? It rings incredibly false and superficial to me. How is this about tech? The headspace this person is in seems like pure misery.

It's social commentary about class, fame, and fate – all things very relevant to hackers and news.

It's just weird celebrity worship dressed up by arguing that celebrity is somehow this innate characteristic his specific friend Adam can spot. This is tabloid ontology.

I've worked in the celebrity space for a long time, there is no there there, the dehumanizing of celebrities (and oneself) via worship, para-socializing or unearned castigation is all brain rot.

This attempt to hide ungrounded "People Magazine" supermarket aisle foolishness behind pseudo gonzo journalism is such a lipstick on a pig move.

It’s not celebrity worship, it’s trying to show the absurdity of celebrity worship.

It's in the frame and it's mid. There is enough ambiguity of interpretation (as is the nature of gonzo writing) and one instance of saying willow smith talks like a homeless person to trick people into missing the frame the article adopts, the mean spirited takedown and the worship are the same. This is literally textbook tabloid framing, the tabloid elevates, the tabloid destroys, the tabloid tells you have nothing better to do while you wait in a long line. This article is celebrity worship tabloid brain rot.

I too work in the attention economy and found the essay relevant and an enjoyable reminder of some of the genx era/Pitchfork era commentary.

Are you being sarcastic?

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