thinking about memes, thinking about thinking...

[elanya]

Right's it's early in the morning, so my brain should be all fresh and alert right?

I've been thinking about memes. SOme of the ones I see go by... mostly the randomly generated quizes, are silly. Sometimes they are amusingly silly, in their own way, or when interpreted correctly. I like taking them for fake people and seeing how they turn out.

Some of them are neat, like the interview one, for instance, or the one where you tell people honestly what you think of them. Or the picture one, where people leave you pictures that make them think of you. In a way, it's egotistical, yes, but it is also an interesting way of seeing what people think of you, and of contrasting perceptions between your friends and between yourself and your friends. I really don't see what's wrong with that. And even if it is 'only' ego stroking, what's wrong with that? Isn't self validation part of the reason we need people? Is it more acceptable to troll for comliments subtly than to ask for them?

Some of memes are creative, like the one that eljuno posted last night, where you leave a comment and he makes you an icon based on one of your lj interests. I think it's pretty nifty, but I won't be joining since I couldn't design an icon if my life depended it. Well I won't be offering you that opportunity, I did ask Juno for an icon. (And my apologies in regards to pronouns by the way, I'm not quite sure where things fall, so to speak...). Just because you're participating in something that other people have done first, does that mean that it isn't worthwhile?

Anyway, I do have more things to say on the subject, but I have to be off to class...

Comments

[f00dave.livejournal.com]

It's true that you lack a certain social grace, and this has been noted in the past, bu yourself and others. You calim not to care, and that's fine. I believe you most of the time.

Perhaps what's missing is a careful definition of what it means to "not care", when I use that phrase. It comes down to a distillation of the above: I lack interest in expending the effort to bridge to a mind that I believe isn't going to be interested in my ideas (or in supplying ideas that I would find interesting). I can expand if desired.


however, I think that your inability to understand people is really going to hurt you in the long run, in any number of ways. You really seem unable to see past the dichotomy of rational/emotional, which is a shame, because this dichotomy if an over-simplistic model and not representative of how most people really think, act, and, generally, live.

I understand your objection, though as mentioned above, I don't see this as a dichotomy, but as a continuum, where the extreme positions are mutually exclusive. I place myself very near the extreme, but admit that the huge majority are somewhere in between (though "clustered", IMO). I also understand that this isn't an adequate model of people's behaviour, though it does serve as a sort of "general classifier" for guiding my discussions with people I meet. Life is too short to obey all the social pleasantries, if doing so limits the amount of intellectual activity that can be shared.

True objectivity may be a noble goal for a scientist, but it is not one that is possible to obtain, and I think that sometimes you think yourself closer to it than you really are.

Hmm. I appreciate the observation, a "reality check" is a good thing now and then. ;-) I don't believe myself to be as nearly objective as you suggest, though. I know, probably far better than you do, just how far I am from being "truly objective". There's a reason I don't accept the self-label of scientist. Not yet, anyway. I aspire to be a scientist, though there's a long, long ways to go before that happens.


Anyway, that was sort of a digression. I think my thoughts on compliment giving/receiving is being better illustrated in the ongoing dialogue with your wife, atm, so I am not going to repeat it here.

Groovy.


BTW: "catalystic" (catalytic), "bu" (by), "calim" (claim), "however" (capitalization)