💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 05 › 28 › you-are-probably-weird.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:55:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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You Are Probably Weird

gemini://szczezuja.flounder.online/gemlog/2023-05-27-From-my-bubble-about-Bubble.gmi

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-joseph-henrich.html

The second link discusses how some cultures are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic).

An interesting test is how you complete the question "I am ______".

WEIRD people speak of their "attributes, aspirations, accomplishments"; not-WEIRD people instead talk about relationships, how they map with their family or society. This could be seen as talking about yourself as a node on a graph (what attributes do I got?) or as a link (who am I connected to?). Kind of like how the individual can vanish from Confucian thought, or is paramount in some Western traditions.

Religion is also touched on, and the crazy rituals that are seen as complicated and illogical (or, perhaps, "fascinating") by the rationalists. Notably, communes that got religion have higher odds of sticking together; a bag of rationalists will tend to fall apart--there are no rituals or really anything that keeps them together. Do they need a group to craft their perfect emacs configuration? Probably not.

Okay, but how does this summary of that article relate to gemini?

The early internet probably had the ritual on-boarding of noobs, until that broke down (this is Sun, 10862nd et. Sept. 1993) among other such rituals and expected in-group behaviour. This was a very small group of people, and most were pretty WEIRD. There may have been some invention of religion. There might be nostalgia for this era.

Okay, but how does this relate to gemini?

Capsules tend towards WEIRD. They are individualistic, nodes. Geminispace (among other sites--midnight.pub, maybe?) is more communal. There are lower barriers to entry, there's more feedback, more potential for socialization, insofar as staring at a screen allows for that. Communal sites tend more towards hierarchies, which can be good, or bad--Benevolent Dictator For Life, Billionaire Destroys Former Lights.

Communal spaces lack some of the ritual of setting up your own capsule (is it even a ritual if everyone is doing it a bit differently?). New rituals may develop, or not. Probably there need to be rituals if you want to better keep folks together. Bootstrapping rituals or even a religion might be tricky, especially if the socialization amounts to sometimes peeking over the fence to see what others are up to.

Computers and even reading are still pretty new things.

Reading changed your brain.