[FRIAM] /Topic Latent in: Latent Topics was: enough sleep?

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -

I (think I) experience identity-fluidity through both the "group flow"
referenced in the article and what seems to be nothing more than good
old fashioned "empathy".  

In "group flow" it is as if the team/group becomes part of my extended
self.  This may reflect some narcissism on my part, why don't I
experience this as being "subsumed into a higher power/group/purpose"?

My "empathy", when properly challenged and exercised can lead me to see
things from many perspectives, not simply to "get along", but honestly
to try to understand the problem/solution space that is presented to us
as we explore it by studying it and developing (iterative) solutions. 
My empathy simply proved me multiple parallax.   Admittedly it can also
freeze me with too much info/perspective and it can sometimes lead to
muddied/muddled understandings/solutions.  

What Marcus references as "gelling" and "need for social order" strikes
me as superficial goals which are emergent properties, not sufficient
pre-conditions.  My experience with overly formal organizations is that
they tend to try to enforce those things, losing track of why they can
be useful and how to make sure you obtain enough of them.

Working (mostly) alone, this has become almost entirely academic to
me...  I know I was fairly happy to leave the institutional environment
over 10 years ago and while I made a good run at developing (and
participating in) medium sized project teams I degenerated to working
(mostly) as a singleton.

- Steve

On 4/11/19 2:13 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Hm.  One thing that's not addressed well in that paper (as far as I know, since all I did was skim ... and I'm completely ignorant of the entire domain) is identity fluidity.  The seem to talk about the strength of one's feelings of belonging (or get-alonging, if we translate to your hunger for social order) without addressing any kind of dynamic shifting from one group to another, where the strength of identity is the same in both groups.
>
> E.g. I was an "influence manager" at one of the jobs I hated. In that job, I had to instantaneously switch from the "engineer group" [†] to the "management group" many time during meetings ... like some sort of tortured rat hopping around on an electrified floor.  I'm good at such hopping, which is why they paid me to do it.  But my point is that the strength of my identity as part of management was equal to the strength of my identity as one of the engineers.
>
> In such meetings, I didn't really care if people volunteered for a role or if they were assigned that role by the politic.  But I did care that people weren't fostering friction because of their (seemingly static) visions of their self.  The little voice in my head kept yelling: "Just try to do the work! Who cares what you think about your self?"  I can see how some of them might think *I* had a hunger for social order.  But in reality, it was a desire to escape the electrified floor that is people thinking their identities are real.
>
> [†] Where "engineer" means "vaguely technical, geeky, person", unfortunately.
>
> On 4/11/19 12:56 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Here is an example.   It's come up in different ways over the years and I always find it strange.   I recently was ask to fill in a form where I state what my role on project is.   The project is not well defined and much should be debated IMO.   But there is desire to get on with the business of doing the poorly-defined thing.   In terms of skills, I could do different tasks on such a project.   Should I write down the thing I expect people will expect me to write down (mimic their prejudices) in order to reduce cognitive dissonance and friction, or assert the thing I think is important, or even the thing I like, without regard to the shortest path to having the team `gel' (sarcasm).   My experience is that there a part of any team that just wants consensus, and doesn't care one iota what or why they are doing the thing, or if it is even a good idea.    It is a hunger for social order that I find incomprehensible and unnecessary.
>>
>> On 4/11/19, 12:35 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>     What you seem to be describing is a kind of social "flow", where some say the ego disappears in the midst of it.
>>     
>>     Google presented this:
>>     
>>     Optimal Experience and Optimal Identity: A Multinational Study of the Associations Between Flow and Social Identity
>>     https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00067/full