this needs a venn diagram “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
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I don't know half the people cited at me half as well as I should like, and I like less than half the people cited at me have as well as they deserve.
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A constant source of minor friction and irritation for me is that I pretty much only explore ideas, but a lot of people seem to only explore and cite people... I'm almost never interested in 100% of what somebody else is thinking/writing about. At most it's about 10-15%.
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If 100% of what someone goes on about appears salient, it means they're hedgehogs in one of my foxholes, which means I'll most likely do a quick/rude wikipedia gloss, pick up a couple of representative nuggets and move on. Totalized mindspaces created by totalizing minds bore me.
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"you should check out what X is doing" without a specific bridge idea/connection is generally of zero use/interest to me. I'm by default never interested in what anyone else is up to in a general way. Intellectual narcissism r us. Thinking is an interest graph, not a social graph
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This resonates, although some ideas and ways of thinking are often mapped 1:1 to people, and I wish I had a better handle on those.
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the well known ones are unmistakeable... like christopher alexander, ivan illich, etc. Fortunately, I've never found one that interested me enough that I needed to dive in and mind-meld with them
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I think there's something there about how subject are taught. Subjects taught on the basis of their history (Politics, Literature, Philosophy, some Economics) seem to attract the "people, not ideas" crowd.
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So much this. And even if I am infatuated with 90% of this person’s ideas, that doesn’t make me their disciple, or indicate that I have any interest in their personal life.
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