http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/an-hour-and-a-h.html

He closes with this:

“He said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States.”

Which suggests that the author of this meme may have been — appropriately, I’d say — Obama himself.

I think about these effects all the time. For example there are a lot of pages out there that contain ‘John Udell’ but are about me. If you erroneously believe I am John not Jon, you’ll easily find evidence to support that belief, and you will in turn propagate it. Do these errors increase over time? It would make a fascinating study.

Agreed. There’s also something different about a paragraph-length idea versus a phrase-length one. It would be hard to write “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed” without citing William Gibson. But we lack a similarly punchy soundbite for this meme about Obama.

Maybe Twitter’s great contribution will be to help us master the short form!

First, you write:

> Was Lessig’s paragraph influenced by Sullivan’s, which it’s reasonable to suppose he has read? My guess is that it was. If so, was the influence conscious or unconscious? My guess: unconscious.

For it to have been unconscious, he would have had to have forgotten reading the Sullivan piece, because if he remembered it, the resemblance would have been striking. But Lessig is very smart, and therefore probably would not have forgotten reading the piece. So it probably wasn’t unconscious.

That doesn’t mean it was an unadulterated list from Sullivan. I’ve actually seen the same sentiment reflected before, over the last year or so. Simply restating something that has been, shall we say, ‘going around’, isn’t something that necessarily requires a citation.

Second, the idea that you can “Act your way into a new way of thinking” is most certainly not unique to Urich or Pascale. It is actually a staple in psychology and has its genesis in people from the 1800s like William James and Soren Kierkegaard – whose “leap of faith” is the paradigm example of acting your way into a new way of thinking.

For starters, the militants are most active in assassinating and opposing leaders in muslim countries who have browner skin and more “muslim” credentials than Obama. That is, being a “muslim” leader much closer to the militant position than Obama is, is *no* safety from the wrath of the “young muslim”.

Secondly, it’s easy to see what the svengalis of the “young muslims” would say. They would say, “America is proven to be a paper tiger, and with just a bit of terror they turn towards Islam; thus the terror works. More terror and they will submit to the Ummah!”. This is insanity, but no more insane than the other rationalizations these people use. The point is that the morons predicting that this would melt the heart of the terrorists are brain-addled.

Having said that, I’ll return to topic by remarking that Stefan raises a good point :-)

Cool!

“I highly doubt he was the originator.”

You’re probably right. What is searchable is by definition fairly recent. To Jim’s point:

“The attribution goes to those that make it the easiest to find.”

Yes. To find, and to link to. And as more and more is findable/linkable, there’s more than just attribution going on. We can say who uses which things in which contexts, for which purposes. We can identify groups and patterns of usage. We can observe how minds influence other minds.

And maybe we’ll gain a greater appreciation for the synthetic and collaborative nature of all forms of thought and expression.

I heard that advice from oldtimers in AA when I first got sober 12 years ago, and it was old then. In fact, a quick google of the phrase + “alcoholics anonymous” quickly finds this, attributed to one Mr. Curtiss in the NYTimes July 19, 1987. I highly doubt he was the originator.

Nor likely was Nido Qubein, who get credit for a minor variant at various “inspirational quotations” sites.

In the first instance, searching w/in blogs or books won’t find the prior use, since much of AA lore is either oral or private; in the second, the slight paraphrase makes it less findable via quick searching.

My point being, that although the influence of ideas is indeed growing for a variety of reasons (citation, replication, community formation, etc), the traceability and transparency of that influence may not be keeping pace…