Complex Numbers

If It's All the Fame To You

The article I'm playing with today is quite old by internet standards, dated all the way back in 2013. It's likely that a few things have changed since then—but not human nature.

     Homo Narrativus and the Trouble with Fame  
We think that fame is deserved. We are wrong.

Funny thing about "deserved:" I, for one, would hate to have fame. A bit more reach for my writing, maybe, but I don't want the spotlight or red carpet or cameras in my face or any of that crap. If I became famous, and someone told me I "deserved" it, I'd ask what sin I committed to make me deserve that kind of nonsense.

We humans are storytelling and story-finding machines: homo narrativus, if you will.

I most certainly will not. Not that I disagree with the storytelling bit. It's one reason I'm here. Just stop with the faux binomials already.

In our everyday, human stories, far away from science, we have a limited (if generous) capacity to entertain randomness—we are certainly not homo probabilisticus.

I can only assume this author is a specimen of homo annoyingcuss.

We also instinctively build our stories around individuals.

Yeah, that's, like, so basic you have to know it before even getting accepted into Writing 101.

Both stories tether the complex, stochastic narrative of the larger population to that of an individual. We can’t blame the Times here: This kind of narrative works. We can put ourselves into that person’s mind, walk in their shoes, and travel in their story.

That's a lot of words to rephrase that a thousand deaths are a statistic, while one death is a tragedy.

I'm not going to quote a lot more, here. The basic argument seems to be that fame is due more to the characteristics of the people who make someone or something famous, rather than some intrinsic quality of the famous person or thing.

And the author (who, as far as I know, isn't famous) lays out a decent case for that, but it gets kinda long and maybe even a bit mathy. Mathive? Yeah, I'm going to go with mathive, as in it was a mathive pain in the butt to read all that.

So just one more, then:

The data implies that there is no such thing as fate, only the story of fate. This idea is encoded in the etymology of the word: “fate” derives from the Latin fatus, meaning “spoken”—talk that is done—in direct opposition to the root of “fame,” which is fāma, meaning “talk.”

Retreating to etymology when in doubt about a concept is a trick of mine, too. But I like to think that when I do it, it makes more sense than trying to tease out the difference between "spoken" and "talk." Even if the difference is one of past vs. present continuous tenses (which that quote seems to imply), that's hardly "direct opposition."

Of course, it may be that I'm missing something.

But you know what I'm not missing? Being famous.