Juan Orbea

He just hopes AI it’s not figuring out how to hack the prompt by adding one magic word to the end that changes everything else. What will matter is the quality of ideas and the understanding of what you want. 

Burgis breaks down the theories behind mimetic desire and the teachings of René Girard, why all of our behaviors are imitative, why we desire things we don’t need, and why this all leads to missing out on aspects of life that are far more meaningful and valuable.

Is there really a straight line between you and the things you want in life? Entrepreneur and educator Luke Burgis goes deep on how understanding mimetic desire can help you better connect the dots between where you are now, and where you want to go. 

What’s fascinating is that this is because of math. Nodes that are “ahead” get picked more often by the other nodes because they are ahead and thus offer the nodes choosing them less friction and more benefit. When this gets repeated many times, it systematically directs more resources to the nodes that already have relatively more.

The underlying mechanism for Zipf’s law is not yet agreed on but the main hypothesis is that it’s an outgrowth of the Principle of Least Effort. In short, systems that survive and operate at steady state optimize for efficiency. When they do, things tend to look like Zipf distributions.

However, most people in first world countries are in this situation of opportunity to do extreme good in exchange for a relatively small sacrifice, but most don't do it, mainly due to ignorance of a tractable way in which to do it.