Mimetic Desire

Sampling from everyone you can

Local blogger Celeste-land has a post on “mimetic desire”. I might or might not have had something to do with this particular latest piece. This is because I find the concept of finding what we want and defining our personhood, our preferences, our priors, a really fascinating topic. In my personal mythology, I link it closely to the exact ways which my life differs from other people [many of whom, yes, I look up to].

Summarizing what Celeste said.

- Celeste said that mimetic desire, she defines as being derivative and non-unique, of being [closely] clustered with others. She has a negative opinion on this.

- I disagree with this evaluation as a generalisation. I think mimetic desire is so much more than a drawback of your “average, median human”. I think it underlies most of what makes us successful as individuals, and broadly as a species - about as much as writing does. The women and men of the Renaissance had mimetic desire, aimed at the ancient Greeks and Romans. State leaders in developing Asian countries looked towards the Soviets and the West. I think that was both necessary to organize them together to a vision which they all found worthy of emulation.

Herrmann et al., 2007

Much like prices are an information processing system, so is social status. When you are born, you do not know what makes a good life. There is no way in hell you can stably derive this from first principles, just look at all the different philosophers who have tried. Information on “how to enjoy your life” is distributed among the millions of individuals who are outside of your immediate access. Information on “how to be a good person”, which is about winning in group-level selection (whether that of families, tribes, nations, species or wider groups) is distributed among all the instances of that group (e.g. different nations) that exist. Each individual person or group-level being selected can only sample an epsilon-tiny space of all the states there are. And the state space is SO big -- you need all the samples you can get.

Here is where mimetics (with an i, as opposed to memetics with an e) comes in.

Look at the people around you. Notice, or ignore because it doesn’t matter whether you know or not, that they are physically living in a similar environment as you are - your local one. This means they very likely face the same constraints and pressures as you do, and need to solve them.

Notice which ones are existing (if you can see them, they exist) and succeeding - have lots of resources, have lots of friends. Look at what they are doing.

They exist, so they must have solved for survival. You need to do that too. They have also seemed to solve for thriving and slack. You also want this! Why don’t you just try what they’re doing? Sampling is hard, and the wholesale package of “what they are doing” seems to be working out. If you didn’t “want” to do what they’re doing, you’re letting all this valuable information go for free. If you did, you parallelize your information gathering from the environment, get to learn from other people’s mistakes and rewards they found, embodied in their revealed actions. Get to learn from other people’s social learning from their local networks, so on and so forth, for as many degrees as information compression is efficient.

To be honest, this is how I have made some of the best decisions I have made yet - by choosing my targets as people “who are like me”, and are happy and succeeding. This is how I am getting socialized into being a proper person after a long time of not being that. The day-to-day of this looks like becoming an owner of a framework laptop and a flipper zero and a red checkered flannel overshirt. Writing this blog post. And going on estrogen, of course¹.

As the English and Art teachers say, you have to master the rules before you learn how to break them. Mimetic desire is the first step to becoming as good or eventually better than the targets of your envy.

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What if you say that: the average human doesn’t seem to do well at this. They seem to either want to spend time at the local alcohol hole and sports stadium all day.

Or be anything but college student #29573 that sends instagram reels to his friends and gets drunk on the weekends and doesn’t have a single unique thought.

Well, I think this is because most people have bad taste in who they want to become. Imagine the life of college student #29573. Maybe he fantasises his girlfriend wasn’t so like herself. And of getting his way in the national electoral theatre. And of getting a stereotypical, highly-paid job in the local high-paying sector. This way he has a stable, high position in the local status hierarchy, among his friends and enemies (who are both his competitors).

Um, ok. I’m glad the local hierarchy works for you. But if you happen to read enough reports from outside your local environment, or hear from enough travellers, you could start to be aware of what a better world there can be out there. There is also the “openness to experience” factor, which could be an innate dial. But I think most of the time, people just don’t know, or happen to be so invested in the first sphere they are born into before seeing anything from outside it that they don’t desire to know anymore. It’s not relevant for them. And then there, the information line gets dropped.

Taste is so important to develop. Statistically, you need to sample widely from types of people you want to emulate before finding one that a) is the best available and b) is fitted for you. This is what Knowing Thyself helps with.

Aside: one big reason that autism is a disability is that it removes your ability to access this way of figuring out what is desirable to others, and therefore to build and calibrate a mimetic desire model at the rate of a non-autistic.

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One thing which I fixate on is getting information where it needs to go. Mimetic desire is a large part of how the world runs. I posit that it powers (motivates) a large part of social learning, which is one of the most efficient ways of transferring information from where it is to where it needs to be, as carriers of valuable traditions of tacit information live and die and gradually get replaced.

To Celeste: if you over-index on originality, you can re-invent the wheel; and we all know that the type of people EAs are loooove reinventing the wheel. Maybe you are good at inventing wheels. I am not good at this, and prefer standing on the shoulders of former trailmakers before me, at least for now.

Love,

Ada

1. my whole thing is that I’m jealous of the way that cis women get treated by everyone and cis men don’t. But this feeling pointed me in the right direction to where I needed to go.