Mimetic Traps

https://briantimar.github.io/notes/mimetic/mimetic

119 26 7 years ago

briantimar.github.io

atemerev• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, I am trying to move out from the industry into the academia (physics), as what I am curious about is not satisfied by the industry jobs. To each their own, I guess.

2819b• 7 years ago

To be fair, it sounds like you haven't experienced what it is like to be a full-time academic yet. Anecdotally I hear many more complaints from friends who are in academia than in industry. Low pay, bureaucracy, and rocky path to tenure come to mind...

gaze2• 7 years ago

It’s about the same everywhere.

michaelwu• 7 years ago

I think bureaucracy is not specific to academia but is rather something that just arises when a group of people try to coordinate work among themselves.

gwern• 7 years ago

I really do recommend http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/what-does-any-of-this-have-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276968

laretluval• 7 years ago

Can’t say I’ve ever thought of Twitter as a way to avoid mimetic traps.

totemandtoken• 7 years ago

Yeah, I liked the read but the two tips I somewhat disagree with is the twitter tip (because honestly, even if you use twitter right, there is a low signal to noise ratio) and the price signals for failure/success. Sometimes its better to to accept a title change to create the illusion of a meteoric rise even if the compensation doesn't immediately follow. Also, that specific point makes me think of sales which just makes me shudder

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

Same here.

Also, that specific point makes me think of sales which just makes me shudder

Yeah. I maintain that currently, the marginal RoI on sales&marketing is greater than on actually doing something useful - it's too easy to bullshit people into giving you money, so making money is only weakly correlated with doing something useful.

(I know this hinges on the definition of "useful" and I haven't put enough time to clarify it even for myself, but roughly: for me, something useful means making people happier or suffer less, or increasing the pool of knowledge about the world humanity has. Making people suffer, or part with their money for very suboptimal reasons, has negative utility.)

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

I'd go one further, I think Twitter is a mimetic trap.

edit - and HN definitely is ;)

jxramos• 7 years ago

This is a really mature introspective thought to articulate...

Academics have uniformly rather low salaries, increasing our tendency to focus on social status as a measure of success. Salary gradations are useful for disrupting mimetic effects because they tie effort expended directly to units of universal economic value — convertible to kilos of rice, oil, and stuff in the physical world. A price is a lifeline to reality: all else being equal, the job with the lower wage is probably less valuable. Without this signal, the goals of a peer group are easily decoupled from the outside world, making it easy to drift into time-wasting pursuits.

What a concept, endeavors detached from price signals and the specific distortions he faced in his academic “market” if you will.

c3534l• 7 years ago

Sure, but how many jobs have you had where everyone needed to make quarterly numbers, to the detriment of building something for something for future generations? Money shouldn't be the sole signal of success in society. We have enough (too much of) that already.

worldsayshi• 7 years ago

I think there's a larger issue of flawed heuristics for progress. The kind of memetics this article is talking about is one such heuristic. Going for the money is another.

They are both potentially flawed in their core if the expectation is that they will solve our societal issues. They are both memes in that they are evolved to propagate themselves. And that's what they do best.

closeparen• 7 years ago

It's probably not an accident that vigorous contempt for everything relating to markets and price signals runs high in academia, where differences in pay across occupations are considered a form of structural oppression.

bigred100• 7 years ago

The highest paid folks in my university’s engineering department are making $500k

pjc50• 7 years ago

You want to be a little careful with how deep you dig the "does this really matter?" hole, otherwise you discover it's very dark down there with no reachable bottom. You risk concluding that nothing matters.

taneq• 7 years ago

Yeah, don't stare too deeply into that abyss.

xelxebar• 7 years ago

Or actually go all the way and come full circle. Nothing matters, but you can't escape doing something so might as well do something that matters.

In my experience, deconstructing meaning and value have been most instrumental to me personally finding good ways of constructing meaning and value.

Anyway, thanks for the comment. I love these conversations.

leksak• 7 years ago

Nothing matters, but you can't escape doing something so might as well do something that matters.

This goes straight into Google Keep for a rainy day

notduncansmith• 7 years ago

I found this website useful in navigating that balance: https://meaningness.com/eternalism-nihilism-and-meaningness

takinola• 7 years ago

It is often useful, when climbing a ladder, to ask if you want to get to the top of that ladder. I have had to do this twice in my career and in both cases made a switch to a better timeline. It's not easy to introspect but is extremely valuable to do

macca321• 7 years ago

What a grim mindset. OTOH I really underachieved at uni by not taking it seriously, and the whole system would fall apart if everyone had behaved like me.

Rainymood• 7 years ago

Powerful and insightful article, resonated with me a lot.

Mimetic Traps

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