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[[Narcissism Again]again]

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Pamela McCorduck

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

On Jan 29, 2017, at 12:14 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

So we’re stuck, right, Pamela? There’s nothing we can do? Just sit and take it?

Nick

Oh no. Partly it’s self-correcting. Sherry Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation, and also a new Kindle single interview with Turkle by Paula Span—spend a buck and read it; it’s really interesting) reports on children who despise their parents’ absorption in a smartphone, and tell Turkle that they will raise their own children the way their parents *think* they’re raising their kids, not the way they actually are. The French government has declared that workers of all kinds must have private time, when they’re not available by electronic communication. (That seems to me so French, but hey, whatever works for your culture.)

Partly it takes some self-discipline. Turkle suggests all kinds of times out from technology—dinner time, before bed, that sort of thing. Partly it’s empty emotional calories, and the average person comes away thinking, is that all there is? And joins a book group of humans.

I’m not in despair.

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Steve Smith

Re: [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Eric -

I appreciate your point here. I think the problem in *all* of our "culture wars" is not that one side is evil and the other must fight and defeat them, but that there is a schism in "Ways of Knowing" which, while unresolved, will lead to a schism in "Knowing" itself.

I was raised in "two cultures".

My nuclear family and community were very conservative and rural in nature. They believed in hard work every day, self-denial (to some extent) for the greater good, and many had one version or another of a Bible in their house and in their place of worship, but few (if any) carried or quoted the Bible in everyday life. One of my best friends fathers was a lay preacher but until I went with them for him to give a sermon to a tiny congregation an hour's drive away, I had NO idea they were particularly religious, but his sermon was well formed, articulated and he was charismatic. By day he was a skilled timber-scaler, measuring mostly by eye, how much timber was going to come out of the trees as they marked them for cutting in the forest. He was a very good father and husband. What I suppose people like to call "salt of the earth".

I entered middle-school (then Jr. High) in a still conservative and extractive-industry town, but large enough to have a few (more) free thinkers, and it WAS the end of the 60's with lots of consciousness about war, race, gender in the air. I had been so isolated (no radio or TV reception, very little newspapers beyond the monthly "roundup report" and only *some* magazines (Natl Geo, Life, Reader's Digest, Farmer's Almanac). So the "big world" landed hard on me, but mostly in a "good way". It took me most of 10 years past that point to reframe my world according to the *bigger* world. It helped that I was a DJ at the local small-time radio station for several years and *had to* listen to a LOT of network programming as a consequence. I didn't produce any local news myself to speak of but I *did* have to read it on air and realized that a lot of what I was "saying" was a convenient falsehood that fit the local (small town) aesthetic. I also realized that among the several networks we had on the wire for direct broadcast and record/rebroadcast that there were *some* discrepancies in the "facts", or more to the point, as you bring up, the "perspective". I took to firing up my parent's antique Zenith "WaveMagnet" radio after work and falling asleep to the BBC which not only had funny "voices" but also had an entirely (to my parochial ears) different "Voice". When they canceled draft registration a few months before I turned 18, I decided not to leave my country of origin permanently (as planned) but rather to take the money I'd saved up and go to a *real University* rather than the local Community College as *most* of my fellow A/B students had planned. The C/D students (80%) weren't even considering higher education, and sadly none were planning any adventures in the big world either. My 10 year reunion was very sad, to see where *most* of them had (not) gone with their lives. I'm pretty sure most of them are still rooting for Trump, even though his policies and attitudes are going to hurt THEM a lot more than me.

My point, I suppose, is merely to reinforce what you said... and maybe add, that the rhetoric of the Right is heavily invested in "Facts" and "Truth", and even though *we* might see right through how those facts are cherry picked and the truth distorted (from our perspective), that doesn't mean they aren't earnest. Trump supporters are nothing if not earnest!

- Steve

On 1/28/17 11:59 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

"2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population.... That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. "

Ah, but here is the rub, isn't it? It is not the central accomplishment of the Right. Tough men have always had a place, and "might makes right" is hardly new. The assault on Truth over the past 70 years or so has been lead primarily by people who describe themselves as liberals, in the name of reducing "cultural hegemony" and "colonialism". In that context, the WWII rhetoric about "Jewish science" vs. "German science", is not easy to distinguish in effect from modern rhetoric about "feminist politics" vs "the patriarchy." In both cases it is asserted that Truth is not primary, but rather that Ways of Knowing are primary. What Dewey had was a method of working towards the truth, and as soon as we cannot agree upon a method, we're in trouble.

Though they have some trouble with consistency, it is the Right that has been fighting for "truth" as a central concept much more reliably than the Left. They may seek it in bibles or successful businessmen, but their boots-on-the-ground believe Truth is out there. It would be hard to say the same for those on the left. Even the things they claim to most strongly believe, they will typically drop in an instant if faced with an assertion from another culture, or from someone with multiple "victim" traits. The "your place is to listen" rhetoric, in which claims regarding individual experience trump data, but only when those claims are made by individuals from a "marginalized" group, cannot possibly be compatible with Dewey's approach.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thank you for forwarding this Owen,

I didn’t receive the original.

> So. Let me just share one thought. I have said a hundred times that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously, we will, together , come to it. What was, at the time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a position in the argument. The alternative to this Deweyan position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the matter; there is only the exercise of power. He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the truth. Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won.”
>
> So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that he lies. It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win.

Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me like a digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect. It is the return to a clear focus on the center of the problem that I have been looking for and not been able to express.

The thing is (acknowledging Marcus’s replies also, and the ensuing discussion of the scoping of the claim):

1. Regarding trump itself, I don’t care about it except as I would care if someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled on the kitchen floor. I would feel a sense of urgency to get a strong disinfectant to try somehow to scrub it out. If I felt I couldn’t get rid of it short of cutting out and replacing a part of the floor, that would be within bounds of the discussion. etc. at that level. I care a little more about several of the craven rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again they can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more interest than that. (I believe this is what the NYT editorial called the dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad choice; it feels to me like they have more than earned the category on their own.)

2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population and whatever one calls the “culture” of this (and probably several other) nation(s). That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. In a big and complicated world where people have the impact they do, losing the factual sense of truth is commitment to an undignified form of suicide (emphasis on undignified, otherwise do as you like), alongside a lot of other -cides that are not morally defensible in any terms. To have arrived at a large number of people who have managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point requires a kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through. The “demonstration that liars don’t win” is to be a demonstration to them (as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has them in this bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the common sense they routinely use when (for instance) not sticking their hands into the kitchen broiler or diving head-first onto the back patio, to again become the driver of decisions.

Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is subservient to the consistency of nature that we call fact (filtered and processed, of course, but I claim still the point stands). The heavily social animals start to develop bigger veneers in which power starts to become a major motivator, and partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of fact. But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no bigger than a veneer. Somehow it seems that cultures can, over decades, perform enough decadance that the scope of control of the veneer balloons and that pattern gets both frozen in to behavior and reified in a lot of constructed cultural supports. What is the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out what needs it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?

Eric

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck

Pamela writes:

“Turkle suggests all kinds of times out from technology—dinner time, before bed, that sort of thing.”

There’s conflict that is created between those people that use electronic communication non-stop for their work vs. those that don’t want to. The former are essentially working more hours of the day. All other things being equal, they have productivity advantage, especially for project management type tasks.

This is different than people who are glued to social media. That’s just an addiction.

I don’t really see what the big deal is about high-volume e-mail. For me, it is far better than the telephone. Telephone calls often seem to represent an expectation from the caller that their disorganized wants are more important than my concentration. E-mails can be tracked much easier than voice-mails. They can be composed over many hours if needed as a low-priority part of multitasking. The main problem I have with e-mail is not that correspondents don’t respond with low latency, it is that they forget to or don’t treat it as a serious type of communication. I usually give up on working closely with such people unless they have some exceptional ability or knowledge that I need. Whether people use e-mail concisely, and to a lesser extent, quickly, is a pretty good predictor of how good of a coworker they will be.

Marcus

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

Is the FRIAM list social media?

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Jan 29, 2017 10:11 AM, "Marcus Daniels" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Pamela writes:

“Turkle suggests all kinds of times out from technology—dinner time, before bed, that sort of thing.”

There’s conflict that is created between those people that use electronic communication non-stop for their work vs. those that don’t want to. The former are essentially working more hours of the day. All other things being equal, they have productivity advantage, especially for project management type tasks.

This is different than people who are glued to social media. That’s just an addiction.

I don’t really see what the big deal is about high-volume e-mail. For me, it is far better than the telephone. Telephone calls often seem to represent an expectation from the caller that their disorganized wants are more important than my concentration. E-mails can be tracked much easier than voice-mails. They can be composed over many hours if needed as a low-priority part of multitasking. The main problem I have with e-mail is not that correspondents don’t respond with low latency, it is that they forget to or don’t treat it as a serious type of communication. I usually give up on working closely with such people unless they have some exceptional ability or knowledge that I need. Whether people use e-mail concisely, and to a lesser extent, quickly, is a pretty good predictor of how good of a coworker they will be.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Nick Thompson

Re: [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve,

I love these biographical bits. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the value of a thousand word, word-picture!? A million words?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2017 9:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

Eric -

I was raised in "two cultures".

- Steve

On 1/28/17 11:59 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

"2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population.... That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. "
Ah, but here is the rub, isn't it? It is not the central accomplishment of the Right. Tough men have always had a place, and "might makes right" is hardly new. The assault on Truth over the past 70 years or so has been lead primarily by people who describe themselves as liberals, in the name of reducing "cultural hegemony" and "colonialism". In that context, the WWII rhetoric about "Jewish science" vs. "German science", is not easy to distinguish in effect from modern rhetoric about "feminist politics" vs "the patriarchy." In both cases it is asserted that Truth is not primary, but rather that Ways of Knowing are primary. What Dewey had was a method of working towards the truth, and as soon as we cannot agree upon a method, we're in trouble.
Though they have some trouble with consistency, it is the Right that has been fighting for "truth" as a central concept much more reliably than the Left. They may seek it in bibles or successful businessmen, but their boots-on-the-ground believe Truth is out there. It would be hard to say the same for those on the left. Even the things they claim to most strongly believe, they will typically drop in an instant if faced with an assertion from another culture, or from someone with multiple "victim" traits. The "your place is to listen" rhetoric, in which claims regarding individual experience trump data, but only when those claims are made by individuals from a "marginalized" group, cannot possibly be compatible with Dewey's approach.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Thank you for forwarding this Owen,

I didn’t receive the original.

> So. Let me just share one thought. I have said a hundred times that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously, we will, together , come to it. What was, at the time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a position in the argument. The alternative to this Deweyan position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the matter; there is only the exercise of power. He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the truth. Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won.”
>
> So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that he lies. It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win.

Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me like a digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect. It is the return to a clear focus on the center of the problem that I have been looking for and not been able to express.

The thing is (acknowledging Marcus’s replies also, and the ensuing discussion of the scoping of the claim):

1. Regarding trump itself, I don’t care about it except as I would care if someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled on the kitchen floor. I would feel a sense of urgency to get a strong disinfectant to try somehow to scrub it out. If I felt I couldn’t get rid of it short of cutting out and replacing a part of the floor, that would be within bounds of the discussion. etc. at that level. I care a little more about several of the craven rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again they can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more interest than that. (I believe this is what the NYT editorial called the dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad choice; it feels to me like they have more than earned the category on their own.)

2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population and whatever one calls the “culture” of this (and probably several other) nation(s). That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. In a big and complicated world where people have the impact they do, losing the factual sense of truth is commitment to an undignified form of suicide (emphasis on undignified, otherwise do as you like), alongside a lot of other -cides that are not morally defensible in any terms. To have arrived at a large number of people who have managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point requires a kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through. The “demonstration that liars don’t win” is to be a demonstration to them (as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has them in this bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the common sense they routinely use when (for instance) not sticking their hands into the kitchen broiler or diving head-first onto the back patio, to again become the driver of decisions.

Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is subservient to the consistency of nature that we call fact (filtered and processed, of course, but I claim still the point stands). The heavily social animals start to develop bigger veneers in which power starts to become a major motivator, and partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of fact. But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no bigger than a veneer. Somehow it seems that cultures can, over decades, perform enough decadance that the scope of control of the veneer balloons and that pattern gets both frozen in to behavior and reified in a lot of constructed cultural supports. What is the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out what needs it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?

Eric

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Pamela McCorduck

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

On Jan 29, 2017, at 10:11 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Pamela writes:

“Turkle suggests all kinds of times out from technology—dinner time, before bed, that sort of thing.”

There’s conflict that is created between those people that use electronic communication non-stop for their work vs. those that don’t want to. The former are essentially working more hours of the day. All other things being equal, they have productivity advantage, especially for project management type tasks.

Ah well, I wonder. That “productivity” might be an illusion, the way old-fashioned face time was once thought to contribute to the illusion (manufactured for the boss) of hard work, though not itself useful. The human brain needs rest time. But I don’t know if productivity of those 24/7 workers has been measured in a sound, qualitative way.

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

I was thinking of people that, in other `real world’ settings are just checking on their smartphone what their friends or aspirational friends are up to on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and commenting in trivial ways. Another thing I see a lot is lurker Schadenfreude type reading making fun of people they know (but don’t care about, I guess) who share their small aspects of their lives or repeat obvious things. (Not sure which is more pathetic.)

Although FRIAM drifts around, it is topical, so I would not define it as only a social activity. Perhaps it would be better to start on the next article in Nature, etc. but in truth the simulation or build will only take 5 or 10 minutes, and I can’t get through a paper that fast.

Marcus

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2017 10:14 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

Is the FRIAM list social media?

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Jan 29, 2017 10:11 AM, "Marcus Daniels" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Pamela writes:

“Turkle suggests all kinds of times out from technology—dinner time, before bed, that sort of thing.”

There’s conflict that is created between those people that use electronic communication non-stop for their work vs. those that don’t want to. The former are essentially working more hours of the day. All other things being equal, they have productivity advantage, especially for project management type tasks.

This is different than people who are glued to social media. That’s just an addiction.

I don’t really see what the big deal is about high-volume e-mail. For me, it is far better than the telephone. Telephone calls often seem to represent an expectation from the caller that their disorganized wants are more important than my concentration. E-mails can be tracked much easier than voice-mails. They can be composed over many hours if needed as a low-priority part of multitasking. The main problem I have with e-mail is not that correspondents don’t respond with low latency, it is that they forget to or don’t treat it as a serious type of communication. I usually give up on working closely with such people unless they have some exceptional ability or knowledge that I need. Whether people use e-mail concisely, and to a lesser extent, quickly, is a pretty good predictor of how good of a coworker they will be.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Nick Thompson

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Hi, Steve,

In the end, as always, we seem to agree.

I don’t think of it as hand-wringing. Hand wringing is what liberals do. (};-/)

I think of it as nudging…. Uh, noodging? What IS that word?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2017 8:25 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

Nick-

Steve,

For me, there are only two questions I want you to ask yourself:

Is the Trump administration likely to do things that will irrevocably decrease the quality of life of people you care about?

yes

(How widely you cast that net is your business.)

It is ultimately my business, but the narrower I (or you, or Donald Trump) casts it, the more likely that our "self" interest is going to lead to small and unenlightened consequences. I believe that Marcus coined (or a least introduced it into this conversation) the idea that a significant property of our (dis)loyal opposition is that they live in a small world and do many things to seek to keep it that way. Misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, are all acutely specific examples of this.

And,

Is there anything we can do to alter that probability in any small degree?

There are myriad things we can do and I think the problem is one of finding focus and traction. If I throw MY measly cash at the ACLU but fail to show up at the processes required to get my local demigog (think Susanna Martinez) out of office, then I may have made a less than optimal decision.

I *think* your handwringing is merited, we DO have a BIG problem, but *I* think that doing anything and everything you can think of is a good start whilst seeking more optimal solutions that don't make us all feel as helpless and without traction as many of us do?

- Steve

That’s all I am asking.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2017 9:50 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

Nick -
I know I don't always seem to take your questions seriously, but I generally do.
I DO think the computer industry HAS effectively contributed to a certain kind of isolation. On the other hand, here we are, most of us able to participate in a complex discussion, halfway around the world from one another (or not), many of us unable/unwilling to actually *attend* the Mother Church as it were (FriAM coffee klatch) because of computer technology. But again on the first hand, we sit around in coffee shops ignoring one another while chatting with friends or colleagues 7 time zones away?!
I believe that every form of technological "leverage" follows the metaphor at least far enough to include the "loss of sensitivity" on the strong-end of the lever. Sure, with the right lever, you can heave a 1 ton boulder, but can you gently tweak the last 12 ounces of force to *gently* move it off equilibrium? So I'm not sure HOW to maintain sensitivity in the context of such high leverage. The age of Transportation, Communications, etc. Brought huge societal problems which have either leveled out, or sadly, more likely, normalized.
As for the barfight, I'll let you know... and just fair warning, if you take wagers, put your money on *the other guy*, I might be scrappy, but about all I have going for me any more is mass, the ability to take a beating, and a willingness to gouge eyes when required.
- Steve

On 1/28/17 2:31 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Steve –

Is there any way in which the computer industry has contributed to the narcissistic pandemic that is sweeping the world. Is there anything that participants in the computer industry could do tip the world back toward a fact-based attractor?

If the answer to that question is no, then I suppose that starting that barfight might be your highest and best use. Let me know which bar you are going to, so I can come and watch.

But I think the question is yes.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2017 1:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

Toolkit? This rusty old box filled with rusty things that once resembled sharp tools and useful fasteners?

I was thinking that if we *all* burned one gallon of petrol *less* a month (and everyone "like us") the demand would drop commensurately and the cost/value proposition for the pipelines we all love to hate would (eventually) drop below a certain threshold.

Similarly, if we *all* made it a point to have one *more* thoughtful conversation (not just a rant) with those not already in the choir, we might reverse the tide of *ugly* populism and replace it with something more human (maybe still a form of populism, but not nationalistic/xenophobic/misogynistic?).

If we *all* quit worrying about how the Trump Ascension was going to hurt *our* personal context and recognized how it was going to hurt (or in some twisted or strange way help) the larger context and then only consider how our personal context would be effected in turn by the larger context (is a happier, healthier, more informed society good or bad for you and your family? vs can I pay lower taxes, get more government services and be afforded less expensive access to other resources nominally part of the commons?)

et cetera, ad nauseum

I know I'm preaching (somewhat) to the choir here, time to take my own advice and go start a barfight with a Trumpian or something,
- Steve
Ok Steve,

The only reason to accept responsibility is to Take Charge.

I have been able to think of only one concrete thing that I can do with my limited set of skills: Write Apple and tell them to stop calling new products “I-this” and “I-that.” When are they going to release the WE-phone.

You must have something in your tool kit more effective than that!

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2017 9:38 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

What can WE hobbits do?
Scratch our hairy knuckles and indulge in second dinnerses?

Fun aside, I DO appreciate your sentiment here and agree that the Narcissist in Chief is at least partly a (focused) reflection of our own worst qualities, and *perhaps* if we tend our own garden even a little, it will help with the greater picture.

- Candide
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2017 1:39 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]; Friam [hidden email]
Cc: penny thompson [hidden email]; 'Bruce Simon' [hidden email]; 'Dix McComas' [hidden email]; 'Grant Franks' [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

Yes, agree. Trump’s point of view is “Whatever I can win with is true.” And if he wins with what we call “a lie”, it is true for him. Exactly.

If you ask how we can counter and resist him, then I would say peaceful protests are the right way. The women's march was impressive, and the rebellion of the social media managers from the national parks is really refreshing. Who would have thought that the national parks would strike back? Like Treebeard who becomes alive.

In JK Rowling's novels it is the little creatures like the house elves that beat the evil in the end. In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings it is the Hobbits that beat the evil enemy. I think in this case people like Ken Bone are the Hobbits of the 21st century. The modern Hobbits are adverage midwestern guys who support Mr. T-Rump and his "party" on Twitter and hope to get a bit rich and famous along the way.

People like Ken Bone are like Frodo the Hobbit, Mr. T-Rump is Sauron and Jack Dorsey is the ringwraith. Will Ken Bone throw the ring into Mt. Doom, i.e. will he stop following Trump on Twitter and/or quit Twitter completely? If we all stop following and listening him he loses his power. This includes the senior Republican politicians who do not speak up against him because they hope for a job in his administration.

Cheers,

Jochen

Sent from my Tricorder

-------- Original message --------
From: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Date: 1/28/17 01:57 (GMT+01:00)
To: Friam <[hidden email]>
Cc: penny thompson <[hidden email]>, 'Bruce Simon' <[hidden email]>, 'Dix McComas' <[hidden email]>, 'Grant Franks' <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

Hi everybody,
I kind of got buried by the list last week, but we seem to keep coming back to this topic, even when we are talking about globalism.
So. Let me just share one thought. I have said a hundred times that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously, we will, together , come to it. What was, at the time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a position in the argument. The alternative to this Deweyan position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the matter; there is only the exercise of power. He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the truth. Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won.”
So. My sense of trump is that in fact, he is not lying. On the contrary, he does not share the view of discourse that makes lying a possibility. From Trump’s point of view, “Whatever I can win with is true.” Hence, if he wins with what we call “a lie”, it is true.
I feel we are straying along the edge of some Nietzschean chasm here. Unfortunately I haven’t read any Nietzsche . A brief rummage in Wikipedia, led me to The Parable of the Madman. And THAT led me to wonder if the TV Series, Madmen, about marketing execs in the 60’s, was written with Nietzsche in mind. In any case, if there is ever a domain in which the truth is that which wins, it would be marketing.
So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that he lies. It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win.
Heavy lift.
Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck

Pamela:

“But I don’t know if productivity of those 24/7 workers has been measured in a sound, qualitative way.”

There is a certain euphoria in momentum even if it means long hours, especially if it is a task that is self-directed. Stopping hurts more than it helps. Days, weeks, months can pass if I’m in that zone. The most draining thing for me is getting tasking to do this or that unmotivated or pointless random thing, and especially if I know the people handing out the instructions don’t particularly know (or care about) what they are doing. To get such requests 24/7 would be horrible. Imagine what kind of monsters could accept such guidance from the Donald day in and day out.

Marcus

David Eric Smith

Re: [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Yes, Eric, good points to modify the claim,

It returns the discussion to the acts one does or does not want to commit, rather than to defense of an icon-group against an enemy-group that both, at this stage, have been bleached of much of the complexity of real people and are more cartoon than flesh.

It is interesting how a few behavioral templates underlie so much that shows up in different normative or institutional garb, in settings that otherwise are very diverse:

There is good faith in people who accept the possibility of being wrong and want to try to work to be less wrong.

There is what I consider bad faith in seeing that as a place to take advantage, though here it gets tricky on both sides, because many of those I think are being opportunists would claim they are no such thing, and those who don’t want to be dogmatically wrong continue to wonder what they haven’t seen.

The idea of “Ways of knowing” had an honest side, somewhere along the way: the good-faith version of it says the inter-subjective is a remedy for some of the limits of the subjective. Many eyes looking at the finger and the moon have a better chance of telling which is which through parallax. This branch of the ways-of-knowing crowd might not argue with Dewey’s long-term method, but the thing that would set them apart would be a deeper skepticism of the ability of the participants to ever see much beyond their own filters.

The bad-faith version is, perhaps, easier to see and to criticize without too many qualifications when it becomes reified in doctrine. No better example I can think of than Original Sin. Don’t blame people for what they do and could do differently. Very specifically pick constitutional things that they _are_ and blame them for those, precisely because those cannot be changed. If they try to “not deserve” the blame by doing what you said was required (“good works”), not only refuse to accept it, but blame them a second time for the new sin of hubris, to imagine that anything within their power to choose could be big enough to address the sins you laid on them the first time. Blame becomes the gift that keeps on giving; you can extract concessions endlessly, if you are such a misanthrope that you can live with yourself practicing such behavior. Those who grew up under the thumb of dogmatic Christian communities will recognize the various doctrinal buzzwords in the above.

The Jonathan Haidt thread that was running here a few weeks ago had a chance to handle this well, but it was disappointing to conclude (and I agree with Roger’s assessment of it) that “He’s [just become] a[nother] partisan.” I live under several streams of this modern version of Original Sin, as an anglo, as a male, as a white-collar worker, an academic, and as someone who has tried to develop a professional skill, and I would like to see it resolved in a way that doesn’t deserve the blame of merely hanging onto privilege. But I have met Haidt (he was at SFI on a few occasions), and I cannot shake the impression that the lure of a cult of personality was too sweet to resist. So I don’t think he will introduce the kinds of real insight to contribute much to progress.

How to bring this back to the main line of the thread, which seems to be how teasing out some understanding-point can help in knowing what to do?

I think I can understand a version of the way people can accept flamboyant lying in place of being careful about fact, even though I remain convinced that their tack is misguided and will be disastrously self-defeating: They mis-trust people who can quote facts in a legalistic way but be disingenuous in dealing with the points that are important. (Grover Norquist, from my point of view, is an archetype of this.) The flamboyant lying isn’t supposed to be about information that anybody intends to use; it is supposed to be some kind of tribal authenticity signal, which they construe as a different relevant dimension of “truth”. (Marcus and Steve and others have already said this far better than I do. Also, we’ll put aside how transparently false and predatory this all appears to me, since the point is to comprehend how somebody else could see it otherwise.) A person who thinks about law conceptually for a living would/should probably argue that the reason it is still better to hew to fact is that, in the end, facts are more resistant to disingenuous use than tribal signals that can be shammed without limit. If the laws are well written, the lawyers can be the most ruthless of advocates, but in the end the factually stronger cases are supposed to win most of the time. I think this is a somewhat quixotic view of law, which hopes that it can escape the need for the slippery notion of good faith by designing better systems, but on the other hand it has a place if it can lead to some inventions that make argument a little more robust when good faith is lacking.

So I get the complexity of many-dimensional points of view. But this case is probably not the most ambiguous instance of that: people are willing accomplices in thier own getting screwed and in screwing a lot of others who don’t deserve it, and there is a certain amount of indulgence in meanness and vulgarity that is probably above the single-percent level in the population. That’s a pure problem and we need to squeeze it back down into the containable margins.

Thanks,

Eric

> On Jan 29, 2017, at 3:59 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> "2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population.... That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. "
>
> Ah, but here is the rub, isn't it? It is not the central accomplishment of the Right. Tough men have always had a place, and "might makes right" is hardly new. The assault on Truth over the past 70 years or so has been lead primarily by people who describe themselves as liberals, in the name of reducing "cultural hegemony" and "colonialism". In that context, the WWII rhetoric about "Jewish science" vs. "German science", is not easy to distinguish in effect from modern rhetoric about "feminist politics" vs "the patriarchy." In both cases it is asserted that Truth is not primary, but rather that Ways of Knowing are primary. What Dewey had was a method of working towards the truth, and as soon as we cannot agree upon a method, we're in trouble.
>
> Though they have some trouble with consistency, it is the Right that has been fighting for "truth" as a central concept much more reliably than the Left. They may seek it in bibles or successful businessmen, but their boots-on-the-ground believe Truth is out there. It would be hard to say the same for those on the left. Even the things they claim to most strongly believe, they will typically drop in an instant if faced with an assertion from another culture, or from someone with multiple "victim" traits. The "your place is to listen" rhetoric, in which claims regarding individual experience trump data, but only when those claims are made by individuals from a "marginalized" group, cannot possibly be compatible with Dewey's approach.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
>
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Thank you for forwarding this Owen,
>
> I didn’t receive the original.
>
> > So. Let me just share one thought. I have said a hundred times that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously, we will, together , come to it. What was, at the time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a position in the argument. The alternative to this Deweyan position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the matter; there is only the exercise of power. He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the truth. Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won.”
> >
> > So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that he lies. It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win.
>
> Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me like a digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect. It is the return to a clear focus on the center of the problem that I have been looking for and not been able to express.
>
> The thing is (acknowledging Marcus’s replies also, and the ensuing discussion of the scoping of the claim):
>
> 1. Regarding trump itself, I don’t care about it except as I would care if someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled on the kitchen floor. I would feel a sense of urgency to get a strong disinfectant to try somehow to scrub it out. If I felt I couldn’t get rid of it short of cutting out and replacing a part of the floor, that would be within bounds of the discussion. etc. at that level. I care a little more about several of the craven rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again they can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more interest than that. (I believe this is what the NYT editorial called the dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad choice; it feels to me like they have more than earned the category on their own.)
>
> 2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population and whatever one calls the “culture” of this (and probably several other) nation(s). That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. In a big and complicated world where people have the impact they do, losing the factual sense of truth is commitment to an undignified form of suicide (emphasis on undignified, otherwise do as you like), alongside a lot of other -cides that are not morally defensible in any terms. To have arrived at a large number of people who have managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point requires a kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through. The “demonstration that liars don’t win” is to be a demonstration to them (as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has them in this bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the common sense they routinely use when (for instance) not sticking their hands into the kitchen broiler or diving head-first onto the back patio, to again become the driver of decisions.
>
> Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is subservient to the consistency of nature that we call fact (filtered and processed, of course, but I claim still the point stands). The heavily social animals start to develop bigger veneers in which power starts to become a major motivator, and partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of fact. But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no bigger than a veneer. Somehow it seems that cultures can, over decades, perform enough decadance that the scope of control of the veneer balloons and that pattern gets both frozen in to behavior and reified in a lot of constructed cultural supports. What is the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out what needs it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?
>
> Eric
>
>
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>
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