From an entry made on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 in a previous blog:
In 1.5 hours, it will be the two-year anniversary of this post. It is an excerpt from an entry from an old, private, discontinued blog of mine that nearly none of you have or ever will see. But neither of these facts are important. My feelings aren’t cyclic with an annual or biannual period. Neither are they recurrent in any even seemingly ordered fashion. Perhaps a lot of my feelings will reside entirely in the past. Anyway. I wrote this entry at a time when I felt cynically about people, and the friendships that I’d made.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with old friends and colleagues as of late. These words have trickled their way into my thoughts, resonating in the back of my mind all week. To whom is this memorable? To me? To the people to whom [the things I've said, words I've typed] were directed?
It’s taken me two years minus 1.5 hours to be able to answer with certainty. To both of us.
First, I couldn’t comment on the “Introduction” article directly, but only wanted to say that it only migrated once (from Dave’s server to my server), not “many times”, and that you can still find the site and all it’s archived articles. Also, to clarify, “it didn’t happen” this year because nobody wanted it to — not because “it” wasn’t available. We’re free to choose, I guess.
To answer your articles question, memory is a scarce resource — we don’t have an infinite capacity for it — so we mainly only retain those memories which are important to us — so, at least for me for example, I am far more likely to remember deep thought-provoking from-the-heart things than bland banal inoffensive pleasantries. I guess the criteria for memory retention can be subjective, but that’s the way I would tackle the question.
Regarding your comment on this post, we will retain the memories that we deem important. Importance is subjective because it’s based on values, and we all rank values differently. But this is obvious, and so uninteresting. *sigh* You failed to read between the lines. This post is directed – it is about specific people, particular exchanged words, actual events – reality, history that *I* remembered. I’ve always wondered if these moments were memorable only to me. I would have been fine if they had been because things that are important to me need not be to others. In this post, I was trying to be subtle while I allude to the fact that I recently had this question answered for me.
Well, obviously I can only speak for myself — nobody can be sure of other people’s criteria for importance — so to the extent that you fit my aforementioned criteria, those momories should be retained. And I don’t think it’s too crude to think that they are pretty universal criteria.
>>I don’t think it’s too crude to think that they are pretty universal criteria.
To be clear, something meets the criteria for importance when we value it. That is, when we value something, it is important to us. So, to say that the criteria are universal is then obvious. It’s the /values/ and the relative weights that we assign them that differ.
This being said, I’ll be generous and assume that you meant to say “nobody can be sure of other people’s VALUES (and not “criteria for importance”)”.
Ok, sure, when we infer another person’s values without any basis, then we can’t be sure. But we can gain a lot of insight on a person’s set of values and the weights they assign to them by paying attention to the things they do, and the choices they make. Also, of course, there are also the values they /say/ they have. You know, when you talk to people, and they disclose the values they believe they have either explicitly or implicitly through the reasoning behind their decision-making.
Read more carefully–I mentioned value/importance as the vague general guideline, then specifically listed a few specific values that apply to at least me. (Namely honesty/passion/genuineness, to paraphrase.)
I didn’t say that they were universal — I specifically said it was a crude opinion/hope, of mine. Similar to saying that the aversion to murder is universal. I would hope it is, but obviously it’s not. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that most people are averse to it.
So, for example, go through each of the memories you want to query, and ask yourself whether they were really genuine/passionate/honest … whether they transcended banality. Originality and rarity are other common criteria, I believe. Of course, it isn’t always easy to properly gauge these qualities.
Ok. Well, we obviously completely agree, then, so there’s no point in dragging this out further.