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Bobkgin -> RE: safe, SANE & Consensual (9/4/2007 11:29:03 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Aswad
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ORIGINAL: Bobkgin
Teaching is a virtue [;)]
Ah. But is it a shared virtue? [:D]
We can but pursue the virtue we recognize.
That others share it or no does not deprive it of its virtue.
That merely makes it popular [;)]
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Besides, I readily admit I have no life. Death does that. But I am building a new life, so ...
Seems familiar. How dead, if one may ask?
My wife and only child.
My life was my family, and when they died, so did I.
Yet I live, and to go on doing so, I must build a new life.
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For example, society is a market place of competing paradigms handed down through the generations within family and kin. The emphasis on group-think is to control the market and limit exposure to competing paradigms.
That's certainly a viable model.
You might want to have a look at the field of memetics.
Thank you for that. I will.
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I agree entirely with that. He's speaking of the motive behind the urge to communicate, and certainly it is based on the need to achieve our goals, whatever they might be.
Not only the motive, but the manner. In regular communication, the payload is the response, while the information is more or less incidental. A lot of the response is related to pack rituals, like bonding. Asking how someone is doing is not usually querying them for information, but rather initiating a bonding ritual. A positive response completes the bonding ritual, while a negative response aborts the bonding ritual, and initiates a distancing of sorts. Provided it's the bonding version, and not an actual query, that is. Personally, I prefer to let the information be the payload, unless I have a distinct need to influence someone (I've learned the response-centric mode with practice, it didn't come naturally).
Indeed. My reticence when it comes to small talk is the result of a minimalist approach: acknowledge and accept the effort, but (usually) do not pursue more than is offered. I've found most people are simply trying to make their space feel a little safer. They are not trying to invite me into the world.
That would require a little more than small talk [;)]
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I'm thinking of "narrow-mindedness" as being the reliance upon one point of view: our own. Perspective is enhanced when there is more than one point of view, but we can never really know a point of view other than our own. Any effort to communicate such a point fo view has to first pass through the filter of our experiences and lessons.
Kind of self-defeating argumentation. If you can't know any POV but your own, then how did you come to have your own POV, given that exposure is impossible? Or are you simply saying that we process the incoming POV? Because that I can go with, of course. I often use the POV of others, in order to interact gainfully with the world.
I think the average human is exceptionally gifted at pattern-detection. It was once a survival skill, now mostly ignored (though continued in some through intellectual pursuits, etc).
In an infant, the empty stomach leads to crying which in turn leads to food being served up. Thus our innate ability to detect patterns forms our point of view: the child who is fed without being hungry experiences a different pattern than the child who is not fed despite hunger, and all points in between, experiences repeated with variations leading to unique points of view.
This is a simple example, it is compouded with the many different kinds of experiences we undergo as we grow.
In other words, our pov begins development as soon as we begin to detect patterns, and is never-ending after that.
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Since that filter rejects that which doesn't conform to what we believe, we end up only reinforcing our own viewpoint, believing we've sampled the viewpoints of others.
Ah, but here's the rub. The filter you are talking about, the prefrontal cortex, is different in various people, which is what that metric measures. Its ability to deal with things that do not conform with previously learned beliefs follows a normal distribution, and is a bit covariant with intelligence. That is one of the abnormalities frequently found in ASDs, ADD and PDD, where the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex operates in a different manner, often causing a lot of the values one is reared with to be rejected before ever being assimilated, among other things. It tends to lend itself to developing very quirky POVs, as seen by the population in general; cf. "engineering mindset" etc.
I would ask which came first: the behaviour or the change in topography? As I understand it, behaviour can modify the topography to a limited extent.
I would also seek to know the precursor conditions that lead to such behavioural abnormalities.
I admit to some skepticism regarding the mapping of the brain, partly because of the selective nature of the test subjects (mostly those with existing problems) and partly because in seeking diagnostic differences it is possible to include rather mundane traits that have no bearing whatsoever but because the are common to a cluster get the appearance of being valid (along the lines that all murderers own dinner plates therefore dinner plates is a diagnostic symptomn of a murderer: a fallacy obvious to us, but when dealing with an unknown such as brain function, is a trap more easily tripped).
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This is one of the reasons a person cannot be helped until they are receptive to it: they simply reject any pov that there is a need for help.
That is, in my experience, a matter of affective threshold. It's known in language studies, but usually not included in other pedagogical studies. NLP tends to cover it, albeit in an indirect fashion. You start out in their frame of reference, on their ground, and then you slowly move toward the desired point of view, monitoring the affective threshold. When you are approaching the affective threshold, you round off, wait a while (e.g. two days), and start from where they are at now. Given a slow and steady approach that does not cross that line, you don't trigger the "reject" response. Works for me, although I rarely find it worth my time and effort to go that slow in convincing someone of something.
At least not outside a professional context.
*smiling*
And that is distniguished from brain-washing in what ways? [;)]
That method, as subtle and subliminal as it is, can be used to encourage an individual to think just about anything.
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And when she says "I trust you, do with me as you will." ?
What do you do when she doesn't want to know the risks, she just wants to serve? How do we reason "informed consent" out of that?
If she doesn't want to discuss the possibilities with me, I bring out my knife, and ask whether she's okay with having her throat slit. That usually elicits a horrified cry of "no!", at which point, with some explanation, she realizes I will require her to either (a) impose no limits on what I can do, and give informed consent to anything, or (b) respect me enough to discuss what lines are not to be crossed. Not that I'd want to slit her throat or anything, but if she doesn't accept it, then there are lines she doesn't accept having me cross, and had better disclose them or stop wasting my time. If she's fine with it, I say "great, first thing we're going to do is have a friendly pdoc give you the once-over to see if I can take that answer at face value or not"...
In my experience, when they "just want to serve without knowing the risks", they either don't know what a sick bastard I am, or they are not thinking about it. Either way is not respecting me. There are exceptions, who are on the level, but those are rare. If there is a blank-check reply, that's a lot less valuable to me, as I either have to see if the check will bounce, or assume that it will and not run up a tab, if you get what I mean. I prefer to have a simple line drawn in my head, rather than having to constantly think about if I am getting close to an invisible one. Lets me play more loosely, and pay attention to the things that I prefer to monitor, while leaving more of my mind available for enjoyment.
Interesting where we diverge here.
I see it as a statement of complete trust in my judgement and ethics that I will not slit her throat, and that she wishes to go wherever I wish to take her.
But we merge again when it comes to wondering just how far will that blank check go.
In such cases I look upon it as 'testing the water a little at a time'. Start easy, introduce a new idea and give her time to adjust, if all goes well, introduce the next idea and so on.
If there is a problem, discuss the difficulty without her being/feeling vulnerable.
I use much the same approach when stretching limits.
If I am as trustworthy as she believes me to be, as I know myself to be, she has nothing to fear, whether she knows the risks or not.
For the only ones I would hold as slave are those I love, and for those I love, I'd die before betraying their trust.
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