Biden beats Trump

[thompnickson2]

If anybody understands what Glen is saying, please explain it to me.  I feel he has tried hard enough.  I sympathise with his frustration, and am taking action.  

(Private Message : Sorry, Jon I lied. )

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:20 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize?  
> Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Was it Brown of Harvard that wrote about the f factor to explain the rise of Hitler and Fascism?  Everyone is attracted to an authoritarian figure (parent imago) to some extent.  When you feel angry at the Trump sycophants it's partly because you identify with them a little.  You've resisted the attraction so why can't they.

Again, in my opinion

Frank

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:40 AM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think you should feel empathy and if you feel judgemental you should understand it's because of your own impulse to behave in the same way as the judged person.

In my opinion.

Frank

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 10:58 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize?  Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, and so I killed it.  For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

 

Kim, help me out, here.

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 10:53 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

"But steeling yourself against WHAT?"

 

The impulse to do the same thing.  Being judgemental is so human that Jesus warned against it.  I don't usually quote him but...

 

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:36 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS,

 

Agreed,  99 and 44/100ths, except where you say,

 

That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it.

 

At this point, any psychologist in the room will ask you (and/or Marcus), What is your moral judgment of THEM doing for YOU?

 

That’s NOT a rhetorical question.  It has an answer. Presumably the answer has something to do with steeling yourself, not in Glen’s sense of that word. But steeling yourself against WHAT?  If I never thought or felt that particular WHAT, would I need to steel myself against it? 

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 6:59 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: David Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

All this, too, turns on things that are facts of the matter.

 

Roger’s post is of course both excellent and empathetic, and when I read it I wanted to just say thanks for it.

 

Marcus’s counterpoint I also agree with.

 

 

But at the end of the day, whether your decision is good or bad turns on what it accomplishes in the actual world of events, relative to other decisions you could make.

 

Fighting public health measures because you are bitter does not get you back to work sooner.  Indeed, it does nothing materially good for anybody.  That seems to be a fairly easy fact from which to start.  Taiwan never had a shutdown.  Japan never had a lockdown, and even in metropolitan Tokyo, where infection density was probably one of the worst two areas (the other being up around Sapporo, per million), there was about a month of business shutdown.  One time.  I forget or didn’t learn details about S. Korea, but I think they never had a broad or ongoing lockdown; maybe short local ones at most, and some business suspensions.  Those countries will have public health costs, a period of broad-based business costs, and sector-specific longer-term severe business costs in areas like bars or nightclubs or karaoke parlors, etc.  It will be heavy but it need not lead to a depression.  If vaccines work, the duration of the really bad sector impact will be measured in years, but not be permanent.

 

The US, by refusing to spend 10G$ in mitigation at the beginning, followed by wallowing in indulgence of wounded vanities, has now spent 2.4T$ in extra unemployment, and probably needs to spend something on that order more.  It will go on, in the best case, for a year from the start.  Plus they need to pay the public health support costs, which are much higher than they were at the start.  The ones with market power can push the exploitation curve harder and harder, so that the stock markets remain high while unemployment and all three of personal, business, and government debt climb and climb, but at some point no amount of market power will compensate for the reality that debt service has consumed all the income workers can generate, and they are not extended any more revolving credit.  For the US government, I guess something like that will happen when foreign lenders compute that it will be mechanistically impossible for the US to repay any further loans they make to it by buying government debt.  I have in mind the picture of core collapse at the end of the red giant phase of stellar lifecycles, that leads to supernovae.  I don’t see anything that escapes from just these accounting identities, which turn on what has already been spent.

 

To be sure, there are better and worse decisions going forward.  Money on testing is nearly money poured down a well when you have as many cases as we now do; the return is much less because you are dabbing your eyes with a hanky while standing out in a downpour.  So some strategic and focused use, with emphasis on very low-cost surveillance tests, combined with heavy public health behavior pressure, is probably all that pays.  All other money in public health goes into vaccine distribution supply chains, I guess.

 

The other major area, I take from one of Shubik’s themes.  He always emphasized (as I have said on this list before) that the government has two roles in an economy.  One is as the setter of rules of the game; the other is as large coordinated player in the game.  So, e.g. monetary versus fiscal policy.  Monetary is setting the rate of interest for central-bank borrowing, which doesn’t set the money in the society but affects the rates at which private actors can choose to change it.  Fiscal is government spending, “quantitative easing” by buying troubled debt, issuing government bonds, and so forth.

 

Similarly, Shubik used to say repeatedly that there should be a Federal Jobs Program, which is not equally activated all the time, but is a source of emergency employment stability during down-cycles.  One could pick things like discretionary infrastructure repair, which is not the highest priority during boom times, when some of that can be done through private companies, but is a useful thing to pay people to do during employment crises because it gives predictable income and gets something done that was needed anyway.  I would put retooling to non-fossil energy storage and distribution systems, with worker re-training to do it, in that category too.  Two birds with one stone.

 

To me, where that fits in is in parallel to the rules/player distinction.  Supporting re-formation of collective bargaining to try to rein in the productivity-pay gap, or minimum wage laws, are regulatory roles.  On the long term, they are necessary, but they are too slow to save this administration from being swamped again in a backlash midterm, and then getting replaced by the true antichrist in the next presidential.  Direct hiring with a federal jobs program is the only thing I can see where the government can act fast enough, on large enough scale, to deliver to the blue-collar formerly-democratic voting bloc a real reason to support that administration. 

 

Similarly, I have head complaining, but not done the work to know how much of it is true, that business loan-support is getting in significant part siphoned off by people who don’t really need it, to the exclusion of many who do.  There is some new micro-data modeling consortium involving some Harvard professors and somebody else (heard in a snippet on NPR) to try to micro-target the next round of bailout money (unemployment and business support) to where it is really needed.  But one could say that one way to avoid the overhead of skimming that comes with giving it to the private sector, is to try to identify areas where the government can just directly employ the privately unemployed.  It then controls the wages and is sue they end up with the workers.  That’s not a great solution, because it leaves the private business that employed them in the lurch, so some other layer would be needed to tide those people over in a sort of dormant or tun state.  But in terms of cost per output, it seems that it recovers certain losses that have been major leakages in the style of spending done so far.

 

Not to claim that any of this is easy or that I see what should be done (I don’t have either the knowledge or the expertise).  But it does seem that there are more mechanisms available than those being used.  It also seems that distinguishing the timescales between the government’s impact as setter of rules of the game, versus as player in the game, gives a starting point when trying to figure out how to regain some electoral stability and give the Dems enough of a footprint in rural areas to be allowed to actually do work that would help anybody.

 

What I say above may or may not be correct.  I put it forth as an example of a kind of argument that one can try to make, because SOMETHING is actually correct, and one can try to figure out what that is.

 

If the battleground or red-stater’s way of life is to be permanently angry, support the abusers who make their situations even worse, then get angrier as a result and support even worse abusers, they may be sincere, but I think it is a completely non-ideological thing to argue that they are not pursuing the best course of action that exists.  And the existence of other countries (which one can read about on the internet!) is sufficient evidence that something is possible, that an ordinary person ought to be capable of knowing it is not a law of physics that things have to be exactly as bad as they currently are here.  That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it.

 

Anyway, 

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Nov 11, 2020, at 1:35 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Roger writes:

 

< These people weren't voting for rascism, misogyny, narcissism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, gimp shaming, science denialism, or all that other baggage, they were overlooking it for reasons. >

 

Many of those that could not work due to COVID restrictions are often in battleground or red states.   That’s the only way I can possibly begin to rationalize the 71 million.  To me, overlooking those things is unacceptable.   It’s not useful to exercise any empathy for them.   They made a deal with the devil.   It should have been a win by 50 million, not 5 million.  

 

Marcus

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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

After you are in touch with the empathy and understand it, feel free to reject the Trumpers and feel angry at them.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:42 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

If anybody understands what Glen is saying, please explain it to me.  I feel he has tried hard enough.  I sympathise with his frustration, and am taking action. 

(Private Message : Sorry, Jon I lied. )

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:20 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize? 
> Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

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[thompnickson2]

Frank wrote

 

and feel angry at them

 

But you are always free to feel angry at them.  The question is, “What is that doing for you?  Why bother? And why do you NOT feel free to be angry, any time you want?  And does “feeling free to be angry” have anything to do with “being angry”?  Who knows what evil lurks in the depths of the human heart?  The Shadow Knows. 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:47 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

After you are in touch with the empathy and understand it, feel free to reject the Trumpers and feel angry at them.

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:42 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

If anybody understands what Glen is saying, please explain it to me.  I feel he has tried hard enough.  I sympathise with his frustration, and am taking action. 

(Private Message : Sorry, Jon I lied. )

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:20 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize? 
> Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

 

Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

If you feel angry at them while not understanding that it's because they're similar to you then you will feel ambivalent about your anger.  If they're not similar to you you probably won't feel anger

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:55 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank wrote

 

and feel angry at them

 

But you are always free to feel angry at them.  The question is, “What is that doing for you?  Why bother? And why do you NOT feel free to be angry, any time you want?  And does “feeling free to be angry” have anything to do with “being angry”?  Who knows what evil lurks in the depths of the human heart?  The Shadow Knows. 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:47 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

After you are in touch with the empathy and understand it, feel free to reject the Trumpers and feel angry at them.

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:42 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

If anybody understands what Glen is saying, please explain it to me.  I feel he has tried hard enough.  I sympathise with his frustration, and am taking action. 

(Private Message : Sorry, Jon I lied. )

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:20 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize? 
> Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

 

Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

By the way I'm really oversimplifying here.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 12:00 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

If you feel angry at them while not understanding that it's because they're similar to you then you will feel ambivalent about your anger.  If they're not similar to you you probably won't feel anger

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:55 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank wrote

 

and feel angry at them

 

But you are always free to feel angry at them.  The question is, “What is that doing for you?  Why bother? And why do you NOT feel free to be angry, any time you want?  And does “feeling free to be angry” have anything to do with “being angry”?  Who knows what evil lurks in the depths of the human heart?  The Shadow Knows. 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:47 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

After you are in touch with the empathy and understand it, feel free to reject the Trumpers and feel angry at them.

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:42 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

If anybody understands what Glen is saying, please explain it to me.  I feel he has tried hard enough.  I sympathise with his frustration, and am taking action. 

(Private Message : Sorry, Jon I lied. )

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:20 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize? 
> Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

 

Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

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[David Eric Smith]

Nick, you just fell into your own tiger trap:

On Nov 12, 2020, at 12:57 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

...

Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever. 

Didn’t you write an email a day or so ago saying that the acting self and the executive self would not be expected to be the same things?

If I lear a second language as an adult, the only way I will ever speak it with the right sound and rhythm is if I have taken it in with the child’s language-learning mind.  Unfortunately, I don’t have that any more, or the child’s fast-processing language-learning ear.  They aren’t totally gone, just degraded and overlayered.  But I have an executive self that can read grammar books, schedule recorded speech in segments, and lots more.  In particular, I can set up _expectations_ that make the degraded child’s ear ready to hear something when it comes by, without having to recognize it and catch it spontaneously as the undegraded child’s mind could have done. 

Point being: I don’t make the mistake that the executive me that reads grammars has ever learned the language in the right way.  But it has a role in giving crutches to the child-me to extend its function a little further than would have been.

I feel sure this is why various religions have all sorts of moral practices, the same way as soldiers have practices with guns.  Install into the hippocampus what you want to be ready to use.

I would have been happy to have Frank’s answer speak for me, also, though it overlaps only in part with the answer I did give.

Eric

So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel. 

 

Kim, help me out, here.

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 10:53 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

"But steeling yourself against WHAT?"

 

The impulse to do the same thing.  Being judgemental is so human that Jesus warned against it.  I don't usually quote him but...

 

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:36 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS,

 

Agreed,  99 and 44/100ths, except where you say, 

 

That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it.

 

At this point, any psychologist in the room will ask you (and/or Marcus), What is your moral judgment of THEM doing for YOU?

 

That’s NOT a rhetorical question.  It has an answer. Presumably the answer has something to do with steeling yourself, not in Glen’s sense of that word. But steeling yourself against WHAT?  If I never thought or felt that particular WHAT, would I need to steel myself against it?  

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 6:59 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: David Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

All this, too, turns on things that are facts of the matter.

 

Roger’s post is of course both excellent and empathetic, and when I read it I wanted to just say thanks for it.

 

Marcus’s counterpoint I also agree with.

 

 

But at the end of the day, whether your decision is good or bad turns on what it accomplishes in the actual world of events, relative to other decisions you could make.

 

Fighting public health measures because you are bitter does not get you back to work sooner.  Indeed, it does nothing materially good for anybody.  That seems to be a fairly easy fact from which to start.  Taiwan never had a shutdown.  Japan never had a lockdown, and even in metropolitan Tokyo, where infection density was probably one of the worst two areas (the other being up around Sapporo, per million), there was about a month of business shutdown.  One time.  I forget or didn’t learn details about S. Korea, but I think they never had a broad or ongoing lockdown; maybe short local ones at most, and some business suspensions.  Those countries will have public health costs, a period of broad-based business costs, and sector-specific longer-term severe business costs in areas like bars or nightclubs or karaoke parlors, etc.  It will be heavy but it need not lead to a depression.  If vaccines work, the duration of the really bad sector impact will be measured in years, but not be permanent.

 

The US, by refusing to spend 10G$ in mitigation at the beginning, followed by wallowing in indulgence of wounded vanities, has now spent 2.4T$ in extra unemployment, and probably needs to spend something on that order more.  It will go on, in the best case, for a year from the start.  Plus they need to pay the public health support costs, which are much higher than they were at the start.  The ones with market power can push the exploitation curve harder and harder, so that the stock markets remain high while unemployment and all three of personal, business, and government debt climb and climb, but at some point no amount of market power will compensate for the reality that debt service has consumed all the income workers can generate, and they are not extended any more revolving credit.  For the US government, I guess something like that will happen when foreign lenders compute that it will be mechanistically impossible for the US to repay any further loans they make to it by buying government debt.  I have in mind the picture of core collapse at the end of the red giant phase of stellar lifecycles, that leads to supernovae.  I don’t see anything that escapes from just these accounting identities, which turn on what has already been spent.

 

To be sure, there are better and worse decisions going forward.  Money on testing is nearly money poured down a well when you have as many cases as we now do; the return is much less because you are dabbing your eyes with a hanky while standing out in a downpour.  So some strategic and focused use, with emphasis on very low-cost surveillance tests, combined with heavy public health behavior pressure, is probably all that pays.  All other money in public health goes into vaccine distribution supply chains, I guess.

 

The other major area, I take from one of Shubik’s themes.  He always emphasized (as I have said on this list before) that the government has two roles in an economy.  One is as the setter of rules of the game; the other is as large coordinated player in the game.  So, e.g. monetary versus fiscal policy.  Monetary is setting the rate of interest for central-bank borrowing, which doesn’t set the money in the society but affects the rates at which private actors can choose to change it.  Fiscal is government spending, “quantitative easing” by buying troubled debt, issuing government bonds, and so forth.

 

Similarly, Shubik used to say repeatedly that there should be a Federal Jobs Program, which is not equally activated all the time, but is a source of emergency employment stability during down-cycles.  One could pick things like discretionary infrastructure repair, which is not the highest priority during boom times, when some of that can be done through private companies, but is a useful thing to pay people to do during employment crises because it gives predictable income and gets something done that was needed anyway.  I would put retooling to non-fossil energy storage and distribution systems, with worker re-training to do it, in that category too.  Two birds with one stone.

 

To me, where that fits in is in parallel to the rules/player distinction.  Supporting re-formation of collective bargaining to try to rein in the productivity-pay gap, or minimum wage laws, are regulatory roles.  On the long term, they are necessary, but they are too slow to save this administration from being swamped again in a backlash midterm, and then getting replaced by the true antichrist in the next presidential.  Direct hiring with a federal jobs program is the only thing I can see where the government can act fast enough, on large enough scale, to deliver to the blue-collar formerly-democratic voting bloc a real reason to support that administration. 

 

Similarly, I have head complaining, but not done the work to know how much of it is true, that business loan-support is getting in significant part siphoned off by people who don’t really need it, to the exclusion of many who do.  There is some new micro-data modeling consortium involving some Harvard professors and somebody else (heard in a snippet on NPR) to try to micro-target the next round of bailout money (unemployment and business support) to where it is really needed.  But one could say that one way to avoid the overhead of skimming that comes with giving it to the private sector, is to try to identify areas where the government can just directly employ the privately unemployed.  It then controls the wages and is sue they end up with the workers.  That’s not a great solution, because it leaves the private business that employed them in the lurch, so some other layer would be needed to tide those people over in a sort of dormant or tun state.  But in terms of cost per output, it seems that it recovers certain losses that have been major leakages in the style of spending done so far.

 

Not to claim that any of this is easy or that I see what should be done (I don’t have either the knowledge or the expertise).  But it does seem that there are more mechanisms available than those being used.  It also seems that distinguishing the timescales between the government’s impact as setter of rules of the game, versus as player in the game, gives a starting point when trying to figure out how to regain some electoral stability and give the Dems enough of a footprint in rural areas to be allowed to actually do work that would help anybody.

 

What I say above may or may not be correct.  I put it forth as an example of a kind of argument that one can try to make, because SOMETHING is actually correct, and one can try to figure out what that is.

 

If the battleground or red-stater’s way of life is to be permanently angry, support the abusers who make their situations even worse, then get angrier as a result and support even worse abusers, they may be sincere, but I think it is a completely non-ideological thing to argue that they are not pursuing the best course of action that exists.  And the existence of other countries (which one can read about on the internet!) is sufficient evidence that something is possible, that an ordinary person ought to be capable of knowing it is not a law of physics that things have to be exactly as bad as they currently are here.  That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it.

 

Anyway, 

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Nov 11, 2020, at 1:35 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Roger writes:

 

< These people weren't voting for rascism, misogyny, narcissism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, gimp shaming, science denialism, or all that other baggage, they were overlooking it for reasons. >

 

Many of those that could not work due to COVID restrictions are often in battleground or red states.   That’s the only way I can possibly begin to rationalize the 71 million.  To me, overlooking those things is unacceptable.   It’s not useful to exercise any empathy for them.   They made a deal with the devil.   It should have been a win by 50 million, not 5 million.  

 

Marcus

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[thompnickson2]

I have always had doubts about the notion of an executive intelligence.  It always seems like something that is not effective, but grasped after the fact.  In that earlier message, though, I was trying to push it, see where it would lead.  If it is a trap, it is one that I myself am trying to climb out of.

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 1:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

Nick, you just fell into your own tiger trap:

On Nov 12, 2020, at 12:57 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Frank,

...

Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever. 

 

Didn’t you write an email a day or so ago saying that the acting self and the executive self would not be expected to be the same things?

 

If I lear a second language as an adult, the only way I will ever speak it with the right sound and rhythm is if I have taken it in with the child’s language-learning mind.  Unfortunately, I don’t have that any more, or the child’s fast-processing language-learning ear.  They aren’t totally gone, just degraded and overlayered.  But I have an executive self that can read grammar books, schedule recorded speech in segments, and lots more.  In particular, I can set up _expectations_ that make the degraded child’s ear ready to hear something when it comes by, without having to recognize it and catch it spontaneously as the undegraded child’s mind could have done. 

 

Point being: I don’t make the mistake that the executive me that reads grammars has ever learned the language in the right way.  But it has a role in giving crutches to the child-me to extend its function a little further than would have been.

 

I feel sure this is why various religions have all sorts of moral practices, the same way as soldiers have practices with guns.  Install into the hippocampus what you want to be ready to use.

 

I would have been happy to have Frank’s answer speak for me, also, though it overlaps only in part with the answer I did give.

 

Eric

 

 

 

So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel. 

 

Kim, help me out, here.

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 10:53 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

"But steeling yourself against WHAT?"

 

The impulse to do the same thing.  Being judgemental is so human that Jesus warned against it.  I don't usually quote him but...

 

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:36 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS,

 

Agreed,  99 and 44/100ths, except where you say, 

 

That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it.

 

At this point, any psychologist in the room will ask you (and/or Marcus), What is your moral judgment of THEM doing for YOU?

 

That’s NOT a rhetorical question.  It has an answer. Presumably the answer has something to do with steeling yourself, not in Glen’s sense of that word. But steeling yourself against WHAT?  If I never thought or felt that particular WHAT, would I need to steel myself against it?  

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 6:59 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: David Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

All this, too, turns on things that are facts of the matter.

 

Roger’s post is of course both excellent and empathetic, and when I read it I wanted to just say thanks for it.

 

Marcus’s counterpoint I also agree with.

 

 

But at the end of the day, whether your decision is good or bad turns on what it accomplishes in the actual world of events, relative to other decisions you could make.

 

Fighting public health measures because you are bitter does not get you back to work sooner.  Indeed, it does nothing materially good for anybody.  That seems to be a fairly easy fact from which to start.  Taiwan never had a shutdown.  Japan never had a lockdown, and even in metropolitan Tokyo, where infection density was probably one of the worst two areas (the other being up around Sapporo, per million), there was about a month of business shutdown.  One time.  I forget or didn’t learn details about S. Korea, but I think they never had a broad or ongoing lockdown; maybe short local ones at most, and some business suspensions.  Those countries will have public health costs, a period of broad-based business costs, and sector-specific longer-term severe business costs in areas like bars or nightclubs or karaoke parlors, etc.  It will be heavy but it need not lead to a depression.  If vaccines work, the duration of the really bad sector impact will be measured in years, but not be permanent.

 

The US, by refusing to spend 10G$ in mitigation at the beginning, followed by wallowing in indulgence of wounded vanities, has now spent 2.4T$ in extra unemployment, and probably needs to spend something on that order more.  It will go on, in the best case, for a year from the start.  Plus they need to pay the public health support costs, which are much higher than they were at the start.  The ones with market power can push the exploitation curve harder and harder, so that the stock markets remain high while unemployment and all three of personal, business, and government debt climb and climb, but at some point no amount of market power will compensate for the reality that debt service has consumed all the income workers can generate, and they are not extended any more revolving credit.  For the US government, I guess something like that will happen when foreign lenders compute that it will be mechanistically impossible for the US to repay any further loans they make to it by buying government debt.  I have in mind the picture of core collapse at the end of the red giant phase of stellar lifecycles, that leads to supernovae.  I don’t see anything that escapes from just these accounting identities, which turn on what has already been spent.

 

To be sure, there are better and worse decisions going forward.  Money on testing is nearly money poured down a well when you have as many cases as we now do; the return is much less because you are dabbing your eyes with a hanky while standing out in a downpour.  So some strategic and focused use, with emphasis on very low-cost surveillance tests, combined with heavy public health behavior pressure, is probably all that pays.  All other money in public health goes into vaccine distribution supply chains, I guess.

 

The other major area, I take from one of Shubik’s themes.  He always emphasized (as I have said on this list before) that the government has two roles in an economy.  One is as the setter of rules of the game; the other is as large coordinated player in the game.  So, e.g. monetary versus fiscal policy.  Monetary is setting the rate of interest for central-bank borrowing, which doesn’t set the money in the society but affects the rates at which private actors can choose to change it.  Fiscal is government spending, “quantitative easing” by buying troubled debt, issuing government bonds, and so forth.

 

Similarly, Shubik used to say repeatedly that there should be a Federal Jobs Program, which is not equally activated all the time, but is a source of emergency employment stability during down-cycles.  One could pick things like discretionary infrastructure repair, which is not the highest priority during boom times, when some of that can be done through private companies, but is a useful thing to pay people to do during employment crises because it gives predictable income and gets something done that was needed anyway.  I would put retooling to non-fossil energy storage and distribution systems, with worker re-training to do it, in that category too.  Two birds with one stone.

 

To me, where that fits in is in parallel to the rules/player distinction.  Supporting re-formation of collective bargaining to try to rein in the productivity-pay gap, or minimum wage laws, are regulatory roles.  On the long term, they are necessary, but they are too slow to save this administration from being swamped again in a backlash midterm, and then getting replaced by the true antichrist in the next presidential.  Direct hiring with a federal jobs program is the only thing I can see where the government can act fast enough, on large enough scale, to deliver to the blue-collar formerly-democratic voting bloc a real reason to support that administration. 

 

Similarly, I have head complaining, but not done the work to know how much of it is true, that business loan-support is getting in significant part siphoned off by people who don’t really need it, to the exclusion of many who do.  There is some new micro-data modeling consortium involving some Harvard professors and somebody else (heard in a snippet on NPR) to try to micro-target the next round of bailout money (unemployment and business support) to where it is really needed.  But one could say that one way to avoid the overhead of skimming that comes with giving it to the private sector, is to try to identify areas where the government can just directly employ the privately unemployed.  It then controls the wages and is sue they end up with the workers.  That’s not a great solution, because it leaves the private business that employed them in the lurch, so some other layer would be needed to tide those people over in a sort of dormant or tun state.  But in terms of cost per output, it seems that it recovers certain losses that have been major leakages in the style of spending done so far.

 

Not to claim that any of this is easy or that I see what should be done (I don’t have either the knowledge or the expertise).  But it does seem that there are more mechanisms available than those being used.  It also seems that distinguishing the timescales between the government’s impact as setter of rules of the game, versus as player in the game, gives a starting point when trying to figure out how to regain some electoral stability and give the Dems enough of a footprint in rural areas to be allowed to actually do work that would help anybody.

 

What I say above may or may not be correct.  I put it forth as an example of a kind of argument that one can try to make, because SOMETHING is actually correct, and one can try to figure out what that is.

 

If the battleground or red-stater’s way of life is to be permanently angry, support the abusers who make their situations even worse, then get angrier as a result and support even worse abusers, they may be sincere, but I think it is a completely non-ideological thing to argue that they are not pursuing the best course of action that exists.  And the existence of other countries (which one can read about on the internet!) is sufficient evidence that something is possible, that an ordinary person ought to be capable of knowing it is not a law of physics that things have to be exactly as bad as they currently are here.  That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it.

 

Anyway, 

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Nov 11, 2020, at 1:35 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Roger writes:

 

< These people weren't voting for rascism, misogyny, narcissism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, gimp shaming, science denialism, or all that other baggage, they were overlooking it for reasons. >

 

Many of those that could not work due to COVID restrictions are often in battleground or red states.   That’s the only way I can possibly begin to rationalize the 71 million.  To me, overlooking those things is unacceptable.   It’s not useful to exercise any empathy for them.   They made a deal with the devil.   It should have been a win by 50 million, not 5 million.  

 

Marcus

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[David Eric Smith]

Yes, huge point here.

I don’t feel angry at ticks or V. cholerae.  I would feel very angry at a person who injured something innocent.  

I prefer my affect toward trump to be closer to my affect toward ticks, because I think he is degraded enough to not qualify much as human.

I hold that position, having considered that I need to be careful, because “dehumanizing the enemy”, as it is fashionable to call it in the current writing, is the tactic of genocidalists.  

The trumpers?  Big range.  There’s probably a “Universal Basic Humanity” that you get, which comes with your genotype, and you have to actively squander it to become coeval with a tick.  But to have more humanity than the UBH, you do have to make an effort to deserve it.

Eric

On Nov 12, 2020, at 2:00 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

If you feel angry at them while not understanding that it's because they're similar to you then you will feel ambivalent about your anger.  If they're not similar to you you probably won't feel anger

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 11:55 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank wrote

 

and feel angry at them

 

But you are always free to feel angry at them.  The question is, “What is that doing for you?  Why bother? And why do you NOT feel free to be angry, any time you want?  And does “feeling free to be angry” have anything to do with “being angry”?  Who knows what evil lurks in the depths of the human heart?  The Shadow Knows. 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:47 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

 

After you are in touch with the empathy and understand it, feel free to reject the Trumpers and feel angry at them.

 

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:42 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

If anybody understands what Glen is saying, please explain it to me.  I feel he has tried hard enough.  I sympathise with his frustration, and am taking action. 

(Private Message : Sorry, Jon I lied. )

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:20 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize? 
> Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my empathy into something I should not feel.

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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

 

Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

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[jon zingale]

I feel like this came up in vFriam recently when DJT caught the virus. I
mentioned having empathy then and that empathy was rooted in knowing what it
is like to be sick. I am not sure empathy requires wanting something for
another, wanting them to be well for instance. To some extent, this seems
like a difference wrt sympathy where one has a reactive component. To some
extent, I may wish to see a nazi punched and still empathize with the
experience of being punched.



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[Steve Smith]

I think I didn't post the massive missive I wrote about how "empathy is
rooted in mirror neurons", and it goes up from there including
self-other models, but maybe this one-liner is the only signal in that
noise anyway.

Also commenting on EricS's "dehumanizing" point, I've come to appreciate
the term "othering" and those who introduced it to me as their *own*
resistance to feeling the need to "other" those who they have patently
been "othered" by.


On 11/12/20 12:25 PM, jon zingale wrote:

> I feel like this came up in vFriam recently when DJT caught the virus. I
> mentioned having empathy then and that empathy was rooted in knowing what it
> is like to be sick. I am not sure empathy requires wanting something for
> another, wanting them to be well for instance. To some extent, this seems
> like a difference wrt sympathy where one has a reactive component. To some
> extent, I may wish to see a nazi punched and still empathize with the
> experience of being punched.
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
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[gepr]

Yes. All 4 of our answers to Nick's question are impacted.

MGD: heuristic classification
DES: testing, validation, & paths forward
FCW: reflective governance
GER: challenging the assumption of similar structure

I *still* haven't read The Myth of Mirror Neurons <https://bookshop.org/books/the-myth-of-mirror-neurons-the-real-neuroscience-of-communication-and-cognition/9780393089615>. But my guess is that whether or not they exist, there's something *learned* about both empathy and sympathy. Not having some trait or organ that another has *should* make communication and shared experiences less likely. If someone has never been punched in the face, it should be difficult for them to imagine being punched in the face.


On 11/12/20 11:25 AM, jon zingale wrote:
> I feel like this came up in vFriam recently when DJT caught the virus. I
> mentioned having empathy then and that empathy was rooted in knowing what it
> is like to be sick. I am not sure empathy requires wanting something for
> another, wanting them to be well for instance. To some extent, this seems
> like a difference wrt sympathy where one has a reactive component. To some
> extent, I may wish to see a nazi punched and still empathize with the
> experience of being punched.


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[thompnickson2]

J

I wonder if one can get the full pleasure out of seeing a Nazi punched
WITHOUT experiencing empathy.  

(Private message: I am almost done with the grocery list)
n

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2020 1:26 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

I feel like this came up in vFriam recently when DJT caught the virus. I
mentioned having empathy then and that empathy was rooted in knowing what it
is like to be sick. I am not sure empathy requires wanting something for
another, wanting them to be well for instance. To some extent, this seems
like a difference wrt sympathy where one has a reactive component. To some
extent, I may wish to see a nazi punched and still empathize with the
experience of being punched.



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[Eric Charles-2]

Nick asked if anyone could translate Glen's email... in an effort to do that... larding below

Eric C

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 1:20 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. <Boy have you set me off!> Everything you say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable. <Even if you convinced me that it was silly to talk about the things you do in this moment as commanded by you, certainly you can issue commands to future you. ---- They guy hitting who said something awkward and lost his chance at the girl hits himself on the head a few times saying "Stupid, stupid, why did you say that?" What is he doing? He is trying to control his future self, not his past self. ---- Across long swaths of time whatever "command" is, you can probably do it yourself as effectively as anyone else can command you.> 

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump supporters are not under your intentional control. <Let's grant that you are correct that you, personally, cannot stop yourself from attempting empathy/sympathy under these conditions> And you seem to be saying that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. <Your generalization of that to me and everyone else is suspect, and the way you phrase it is presumptous and pretentious> Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at other times. <I'm not saying that I will literally never be empathetic to any person who happens to be a Trump supporter, at any time, ever. I am saying that I am not going to be empathetic to them as a group, and certainly not empathetic to any of them at all times. I've got a lot to do besides sitting around being empathetic with 60 million strangers. And I'm not in denial or in a soulless trap when I point that out.>

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should understand this episodic concept. <Your relationship with Trump Supporters, as a group, is equivalent to an abusive relationships in important ways> If you have never had such a relationship, then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. <Empathy is one of the things an abuser can use to trap you. The way out of that trap is to be less empathetic the longer the abuse goes on.> The abuser only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood. <If it's bad enough, long enough, it's time to end things one way or another, and any empathy you have left is more time spent crying while you do whatever else you need to do to sever the relationship.> 

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail to understand that, though. <Seriously man.... How can someone who trumpets the virtues of unconditional altruism with conditional association not be willing to walk the hell away from a group of people who are continuously defecting against you?!? It is a winning strategy.> 

 

<Glen, how did I do?>

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On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize?  Why is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought.  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional premise that turns my
> empathy into something I should not feel.

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[gepr]

On 11/12/20 2:47 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>     <Glen, how did I do?>

Excellent! Nailed it.

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