girard

Just one thing - according to Rene Girard religion is a way to control and confine aggression.

As René Girard said, all desires (and hence ideas) are mimetic!

And Girard is, repeatedly and egregiously.

I recommend Rene Girard insight into that.

Philosopher Rene Girard has built a whole theory about this; he thinks there's a fundamental tendency towards scapegoating in human society and that people are never happy unless they have someone to project their negative feelings onto.

So much of HN is half-baked anecdotes about and by LLMs or philosophizing from VCs who talked to an LLM about Rene Girard for twenty minutes or pop sci articles that appear to be posted so that some bored developer can read the abstract and one experiment and dunk on it.

Girard espouses a lot of absolute claims (" all human behavior is mimetic") while discounting other potential factors and certain counter-examples.

A bright line between that which brings conviction to one person and its influence on the body politic cannot be drawn." Girard Trust Co.

It turns out that this is unsound---you can craft ridiculous things like Girard's Paradox to break it---but for "pragmatic" types that's probably not a huge problem.

I'm currently reading "How To Sell Anything To Anybody" by Joe Girard.

But the problem is that a large number of Girard's examples don't support his position.

Girard suggests a new type system for functional languages, one which supports operations that ``change the world''.

A much worse weakness, for example, was Girard's Paradox which showed that theories of a certain simplifying form were contradictory [1].