Friam

An interesting article

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Carter Charbonneau

An interesting article

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876

I won't ruin it by trying to summarize :)

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: An interesting article

Imagine a world in which there were millions of experts on any topic, no matter how obscure. Further imagine that one could submit papers or other kinds of work products for iterative feedback and blind review, and that distribution of the work product did not involve naming the author. For the sake of argument, say that authors on planet A are distributed to readers on planet B and vice versa, and that the authors and readers will never meet. (Something close to this is Wikipedia, and people do contribute to it.) I suggest people do not really need esteem, but they need a way to get out of mental ruts -- they need inputs. Rather, the indoctrinated submissives come to believe in esteem as the currency of mental health, while the authoritarians are laughing at them all the way to the bank. When the author writes, "People, who don't fear for their safety, but who despair of ever achieving love or belonging, are the most submissive", it is important to note that there could be people who don't fear for their safety but also don't despair of achieving love or belonging. They tend to a garden in contented obscurity.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Carter Charbonneau <[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 5:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] An interesting article

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gepr

Re: An interesting article

In reply to this post by Carter Charbonneau

Thanks, Carter! I really want to like that article. And my apophenia suggests it's addressing the prevalence of childish attitudes like Randian Objectivism in tech circles. But my one complaint about the article is the naive conception of submission. Like every other attribute of a complex phenotype, submission and its causes are both robust and polyphenic. One can submit in N dimensions and dominate in M dimensions, which is why we see so much _snark_ amongst dorks and wonks ... like we see among the sophisticates in the Country Mouse trope.

I would submit that many, if not ALL, of us are crypto-submissive or even false-submissive as in the humility topos. I know my Christian neighbor, who wears his submission to Christ on his sleeve, is secretly seething with hatred. I can't tell if he feels trapped (with a full belly and God the Father's boot on his neck) or if he's a crypto- or false submissive, where his "charitable works" are really expressions of dominance, given his very patriarchical family structure.

Also, given the other thread re: emminence and authority, I think it's pretty easy to disambiguate local vs. global esteem. So, here too, Vassar relies on ambiguity for his rhetoric. When someone says "what do you care what other people think" or "they tend to garden in contented obscurity", it makes some sense to ask whether they mean _all_ other people or just some subset of other people? I'd argue that, even amongst this crowd, if the right, particular, person expresses a negative opinion of them, they'll show that they do care what _that_ person thinks. So, sure, it's not a distinction in kind. But it's a very real distinction in degree. Different people have differently-sized networks. And for each of N or M dimensions, their networks can be differently sized and be mediated by different types of relations (e.g. submission or dominance).

It's a good article, though, regardless.

On 05/10/2017 04:41 PM, Carter Charbonneau wrote:
> https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876

On 05/10/2017 10:04 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> it is important to note that there could be people who don't fear for their safety but also don't despair of achieving love or belonging. They tend to a garden in contented obscurity.

--
☣ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen