
Mimetic Traps - leroy_masochist
https://briantimar.github.io/notes/mimetic/mimetic
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jxramos
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
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
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.

~~~
hoseja
There is a confusing difference between "mimetic" and "memetic".

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gwern
I really do recommend [http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/what-does-any-of-this-
have-...](http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-
with-physics)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276968)

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takinola
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

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pjc50
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.

~~~
xelxebar
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
> 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

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atemerev
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
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...

~~~
gaze
It’s about the same everywhere.

~~~
randomsearch
Bureaucracy perhaps but without doubt the politics in academia are some of the
most unpleasant you’ll ever encounter.

~~~
gaze
I’ve encountered truly rotten politics in industry, too. My experience though
is about 6 summer internships and one relatively friendly PhD so maybe I have
a rosy picture.

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

~~~
totemandtoken
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
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.)

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macca321
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.

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Rainymood
Powerful and insightful article, resonated with me a lot.

