Richard wrote:
>No, Tim, I don't know that. Say more, please.
You don't know that your peceptions of others can limit you? (Oh, I find that quite hard to believe! ;-)
If you and I had met for the first time in person rather than in text, as we did, would our ideas have received on the same footing with one another?
Inter-tribal relations will always be a bit dicey. As you must be aware, in about half of the businesses in your own neighborhood the members of the suit-wearing tribe are the ones who's appearence "distances them" and makes their ideas "more likely to be dismissed without consideration" over those of the peirced, blue-haired tribe.
Each tribe has it's own markings and aesthetic, as well as a mythology about why those other from the other tribes act/dress/behave as they do. (A mythology which usually frames the motivations of "them" in less than favorable terms--surprise! surprise!). Only seeing the world through your own tribe's aesthetic and myths can easily limit the variety of memes one can become exposed to (and therefore, take advantage of).
Which really ties quite nicely in with this timely bit of research:
>Survival of the institutionally fittest concepts
> by
> Martin de Jong
>
>
>Abstract
>
> Certain arguments generated by political and administrative
> actors find their way to tangible policy actions, others do not.
> Some information is embraced by actors in institutional
> systems, whereas other arguments and facts can be ignored
> with impunity. Apparently, institutional structures constitute a
> persistent tendency to favour particular arguments at the cost
> of others. In decision making processes, i.e. processes during
> which a selection is to be made among various alternative
> policy options, institutional structures, consisting of existing
> decision rules and practices, operate as an information filter
> creating a conceptual bias.
>
> This article spots the issue of political decision making from
> an evolutionary and memetics perspective, employing terms
> such as variation and selection, mutation and replication,
> information transmission and fit concepts. With the aid of the
> evolutionary theoretical framework, the mechanism that
> decides why and when certain concepts are deemed fruitful
> and others die is pinpointed. Examples from the field of
> investments in transport infrastructure in England are used to
> clarify the line of thought. At the end, the evolutionary
> perspective derived from biology is compared to well-known
> authors in political science to see if complementary ground
> can be found.
>
>Available at URL:
> http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1999/vol3/de_jong_m.html
>
-Prof. Tim