After the adult’s performance, the researcher presented the object to the infants and observed what they did. The babies would pick up the dumbbell and immediately pull it apart—forty out of the fifty times the experiment was conducted. They didn’t mimic what the adults did; they imitated what they thought the adults wanted to do. They read beneath the surface behavior.
The babies in the experiment were pre-linguistic. They were tracking the desires of others before they understood or had words to describe them. They didn’t know or care about why other people wanted something; they simply noticed what they wanted. (查看原文)
People only truly become legends after they retire or die because they enter into a different existential space.
Some models use a trick to cement their Celebristan citizenship: they guard their identities to heighten our sense of intrigue. Banksy, J. D. Salinger, Stanley Kubrick, Elena Ferrante, Terrence Malick, and Daft Punk all have hidden themselves from view, which makes them appear to exist in a different plane. (查看原文)
While Soros focuses on the principle of reflexivity in financial markets, it operates in many other domains of life. People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity. (查看原文)
Mimetic rivalries don’t end well unless one of the two parties involved renounces the rivalry. To understand why, just imagine coming out on top of a rivalry. The act of winning paradoxically brings about defeat. It signals to us that we picked the wrong model in the first place. In the purported words of Groucho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” And neither do we. (查看原文)
Until this point, Enzo Ferrari had been a remote or external model for Ferruccio Lamborghini, outside of his world. Lamborghini had seen his success on the racetrack and watched Ferrari’s stature grow to legendary proportions. He was the clear G.O.A.T. of car manufacturing, and nobody dared compete with him. Ferrari had been a resident of Celebristan. (查看原文)
Tony’s project to make downtown Las Vegas an entrepreneurial hub and happy community was a noble one, in principle. Its downfall was an impoverished view of human nature. (查看原文)
