Today's post, On Things that are Awesome was originally published on 24 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Seven thoughts: I can list more than one thing that is awesome; when I think of "Douglas Hofstadter" I am really thinking of his all-time greatest work; the greatest work is not the person; when we imagine other people we are imagining their output, so the real Douglas Hofstadter is the source of "Douglas Hofstadter"; I most strongly get the sensation of awesomeness when I see someone outdoing me overwhelmingly, at some task I've actually tried; we tend to admire unique detailed awesome things and overlook common nondetailed awesome things; religion and its bastard child "spirituality" tends to make us overlook human awesomeness.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was You're Calling *Who* A Cult Leader?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.