lumrant
Monday, January 19, 2004
Here are a few ideas for writing topics:
- "Open Source People" - I think this would be a good title for some sort of work on transhumanism. Good for right now, anyway, because it could hijack the currently popular "Open Source" terminology to make the concepts more accessible to readers (and seem more positive, to boot).
- Identical twins in history and thymos - The idea here is "write about what you know," and I know what it's like to be an identical twin. The idea was spurred in my head while reading Fukuyama's The End of History, which makes a great case for the idea of "thymos," or the human need for recognition, as a primary driving factor for human behavior. I then wondered to myself who were among the most famous identical twins in history (Romulus and Remus? Chang and Eng?), and whether or not identical twins have attained proportional levels of greatness in comparison to the rest of the population.
I have a pet theory that says identical twins have a special sense of thymos that doesn't require as much external recognition, because there's an internal sense of confidence that another person extremely similar to you is already out there. My feeling is that an entertaining book could be woven that covers various sets of twins in history and puts the thymos idea out there as well. - Why We Believe - I like Shermer's books on our belief patterns, and I'm sure there's a plethora of books out there on what makes people believe, but I'd be interested in writing another. I'd come at it from the "Arab and Jew" perspective of interviewing a crapload of people and seeing what sort of lessons could be teased out. I'm fascinated by the concept of the transformative conversion experience (a la Saul), and I'd be interested to catalog why different people develop and retain a strong religious faith in modern society.
