Very Important People

"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?

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

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

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?

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

Excellent read

> 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.

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

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.