12/ In math there's the concept of a "fixed point". The idea is that you have a line or a grid or whatever of values, and you apply a function to every value, which creates a mapping from the input values to the output values. E.g. imagine the interval of integers -10 to +10
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23/ American Gods is treating Platonically / spergtastically the idea that things have patterns. Which, to be fair, might be the origin of the gods of ancient history. Sort of like pareidolia, but different.
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24/ Anyway, the american gods have shifted between, say 1970 and 2021. The american gods used to include coyboys and astronauts, and now they include female athletes and girl bosses. This cultural change is both upstream and downstream of politics (...and business).
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25/ The gods of a given era are important to understand how people will spend money and how they will vote ... but they're also important because we each precompute and precache possible reactions to situations.
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26/ I'm sure that many an ancient Greek boy thought about how Heracles would respond to a certain situation or a different situation, and stored these responses away and - when confronting such a situation in his own life - emulated his hero.
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27/ I'm not saying that we'll do exactly what our heroes would do, but that our own personal Overton windows for actions and reactions are defined by the tropes and patterns we see in culture.
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28/ I've got more to say about this, but ... I dunno, maybe I'll save it for another time. Want to do something productive with the day. Going to poke at some fiction writing and/or harvest pumpkins.
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31/ I have rarely done things that I'm later proud of after careful thought (in the moment of decision). Most of the things I'm later proud of came after snap decisions, in the moment ... that were based on months or years of reflection and self-definition vs heroes & tropes.
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32/ If you let yourself first ponder whether you're the kind of guy who will { cheat on your wife | run into a burning building to save a child | keep the money in the wallet you find | etc } when you are presented with the choice, your chance of choosing poorly is, IMO, high.
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33/ There's a reason that we decouple selling a movie ticket from redeeming a movie ticket - it means that neither the seller nor the redeemer has an incentive or approach to pocket the money.
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34/ This works when there are two agents (two employees at the theater). Likewise, decoupling, in time, the two agents inside your own head: the decision maker and the decision follower, is a cognitive / social hack that makes collusion harder.
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35/ so, in the individual case, you get to decide which heroes you want to study and emulate. Heracles? George Washington ? Isambard Kingdom Brunell? Malcolm X? However, this is not an unbounded person decision. The menu of heroes you see is curated by society.
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37/ It will not surprise you to learn that I (a socialcon, a rationalist (broadly speaking, not Big Yud trademarked version), and a Catholic) am absolutely appalled by the post-civilization / anti-civilization slate of heroes and tropes that our current cultural betters prepare.
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38/ I talked earlier about fixed points in computations. Societies can not be static, and so they will always evolve, and their tropes and heroes and gods will change over time. We have seen, in the New Ideology, a huge act of myth/hero/god-making in just a few decades >
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39/ Stonewall Riots, Summer of Love, 1960s radical nubian goddess activist, etc.pic.twitter.com/vD8egBpeyO
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40/ the right has created far fewer new hero-gods during this period, but it has done one or two e.g. Tony Starkpic.twitter.com/lK2Eiazf5c
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44/ I suspect that the left's new gods, while much louder and bigger, are not fixed points. childless-gay-sports-woman seems like she can peel off a lot of believers from older gods in societal iteration #498, but I'm not sure how many believers she'll have in iteration #499
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