From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Mon Sep 29 2003 - 20:19:46 MDT
At 05:39 PM 29/09/03 -0600, you wrote:
>[Keith Henson]
>Meta analysis:
>
>People are highly rewarded by attention. (The reason is rooted in our
>evolutionary history as social primates in small tribes. See "Sex, Drugs
>and Cults" for details.)
>
>On the net and in some people, the kind of attention, positive/negative is
>ignored. This results in people being rewarded by being flamed--resulting
>more provoking, more flame. People are very often conditioned by the
>responses they get in cases where they don't understand it at all. A
>classic example of this is the psych classes that condition a professor to
>stay on the left or right edge of a stage during lectures.
>
><snip>
>
>[rhinoceros]
>Thanks for the psychological meta-analysis Keith. The theme of
>indiscriminate attention rewards does seem to be all around us. But I
>wonder... isn't it a special case when we have to do with a particular
>persistent meme which the carrier brings up all the time at all the places
>he frequents. This is especially annoying when it happens in a group which
>has taken the oposite position after long discussions, and currently
>aspires to build on that position. This has happened here many times in
>the past, with different memes and carriers.
I am sorry to say I can't answer your question about a person promoting a
particularly persistent meme counter to the group's consensus. Has the
person actually been "caught" by the meme or is it a case where the meme's
influence in their brain is largely due to the "rewarding" attention the
person is getting from persistently taking an provocative position?
It is one those questions that to answer would require a far deeper
understanding of internal brain processes than is currently possible.
>Is that Wade peson also stuck with a single persistent memeset?
Yes. And in his case some people on the list speculated openly that he
didn't believe what he was spouting but was doing it for attention.
>The remark about answering only to the posts which have an apparent
>problem is something I had noticed too. Of course, it is easier to reply
>to something outright wrong or contrary to our belief system. I wonder if
>we can put some effort to equip our "serious posts" with more explicit and
>obvious "handles" for the reader.
That's a really good idea. You would need people to rate postings though
and that's hard to do. There might be some way to automate the process.
>By the way, I read the #virus IRC chat where you first brought up this
>meta-analysis. That chat, between Mermaid, Lucifer, and Keith Henson, and
>goomba, lasted more than 2 hours and was really illuminating. Well worth
>reading.
>
>http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=;action=chatlog2;channel=%23virus;date=2003-09-28;time=20:00;start=0;max=60
I have actually been rapping about this topic for years in other
places. So if the argument looks fairly polished, well, it has been. You
can see my starting to grope with the concepts in 1997 here:
>Putting aside the "niceties", one can see 3 very important points of view
>which will have to be reconciled. As I read it:
>
>Mermaid pointed out the need for group identity, reaching out, and
>achievement, as opposed to being an introverted community with reputations
>earned "between us". For this reason, she had some reservations to our
>recent heavy engagement with rulemaking and to the suggested VirianNames
>which some may find embarassing.
>
>Lucifer pointed out how the system under development takes care of some of
>the issues, and he was mostly interested in figuring out how some of the
>desired goals can be translated to practical measures and encompassed in a
>better system.
>
>Keith Henson offered some very interesting analysis of what we see here.
>Part of that was the topic of his post in this thread. He also made a
>reference to the evolutionary (genetic) base of group dynamics, and
>suggested a book on "Chimpanzee Politics".
>
>goomba provided the discussion with some feedback on how the younger
>virians see the process.
>
>I do have some past experience with small and rather introverted groups
>with big ambitions. Fierce internal struggles and splinterings are very
>common in this kind of groups.
Me too. Founding the L5 Society in 1975 was my first such experience. Man
was the politics strange there. Everything up to and including Lyndon
LaRouche's nut cult infiltrating local chapters in Pennsylvania. I vividly
remember when Robert Heinlein came down like a ton of bricks on some people
who were trying to subvert the Board of Directors. (And on some of the
other directors who took accusations against the people running L5 at face
value without investigating the accusations for being truthful.)
Perhaps some of the strangeness in L5 can be ascribed to the people being
technical types (like me) that usually don't get involved with politics and
are not strongly inclined that way. (A substantial fraction of L5 was
libertarian or leaning that way and you know how good those folks are at
politics.)
Cryonics politics has been very intense at times, usually from outside
attacks. Those frozen have been kept that way, but a number of potential
patients have been lost due to internal political fights and I expect more
will be.
I think the intensity of politics might be inversely related to how much
real stuff can be done by the group members.
For big agendas . . . I don't think you can get any bigger than transhuman
goals. They subsume space settlement, nanotechnology, cryonics and
everything else I have been interested in for the last 30 years. But while
the problems people are working on are small in the physical sense, they
are hard to work on without industrial scale support. I might post a
proposed method to make large amounts of nanotubes to see if anyone could
do something with it.
>The excuse of "cleansing the group so that we can proceed" was often
>heard. My explanation for this phenomenon used to be that "the arena is
>the group itself". The most ambitious members of such a group tend to
>settle for seeking a reputation not in the big world by means of the group
>but in the group itself. So, behavioral shortcuts are acceptable, because
>in a group of 100 persons you can "do calculations" whereas in the big
>world you can only behave according to the common codes.
>
>This is less common in bigger groups which are already in the "big arena",
>because real things are in stake there.
Hmm. I could really use examples for what you are discussing in the last
two sentences.
Thanks for the comments.
Keith Henson
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