[FRIAM] Few of you ...

[Steven A Smith]

I appreciate the introduction of "roles" and "topics" and "attractors" 
here.    I would say that *I* experience all three slightly differently:

Roles:  This subdivides into (roughly?) 3 modes

 1. Roles I was born/raised into...  Son, brother, classmate, boyfriend,
    husband, father.   These were handed to me by the culture I "became
    me" in.  I may have been mildly more self-aware and some might say
    cynical in my living/experiencing/elaborating these roles.
 2. Roles I adopted more consciously... Friend, Student,
    Employee/Subordinate, Researcher, Technologist, Businessman, etc.  
    These roles are modeled after the ones I saw, but I believe my
    engagement with them exceeded some threshold of self-awareness to
    become self-intention.   Each of these roles might have supspecie.
 3. Roles such as I think Glen refers to, roles adopted in a very
    transient mode... understanding I'm doing so for a specific purpose
    in a specific context for (nominally) a very limited time.... 
    fellow traveler, cynic, seducer, authoritarian, submissive, pleader,
    demander, ranter, raver, etc...

Topics:  I believe these are orthogonal to Roles and I can approach any 
topic from the point of view of one of the roles, or perhaps 
vice-versa.  Topics generally subdivide as follows for me:

 1. Personal.  Things that have an immediate and *personal* meaning to
    me.  These are mostly about self-image, psychological and emotional
    states, physical states, immediate intimate relations, etc.
 2. Public.   These things tend to fall into the arena of (possibly well
    informed) opinions such as politics, religion, aesthetic
    preferences, etc.
 3. Technical.  These things generally fall in to the categories of
    Science or Technology... things which can be studied and much
    derived from "first principles".  These things (in principle) can be
    tested in something like an objective mode.  The "soft sciences" are
    getting "harder" all the time as they take on more mathematical
    rigor, as we live and study them longer we have more formal models
    for them, as we discover/develop new measurement technologies which
    were presumed to be out of reach in the past (e.g. fMRI, crypto,
    big-data analysis, etc.)

Attractors:  I take these to be the psychosocial context in which I 
discover these roles (and role-topic pairs?) and my relation to them.   
The larger culture is where these attractors (in particular the 
born/raised roles (1)) exist.   Type 2 Roles are usually more context 
specific, based in some subculture experience and therefore the 
attractors are more dependent on the sub-context.  Type 3 Roles seem to 
have the most restrictive attractors, depending more on my own 
psychosocial context than perhaps the others, or maybe more to the 
point, those contexts are more idiosyncratic to me.  They are more 
likely to be adopted transiently and therefore have less investment and 
equally I feel the "attractors" are more sweeping... there is a lot more 
"acting as if" or "fake it til you make it" for me in this domain.   I 
might enter a conversation for example, not intending to be a cynic, but 
quickly find myself drawn into it by my conversant's adopting a 
Pollyanna role, for example.

- Steve


On 1/15/19 12:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Marcus,
>
> Would you be happier if we called them "attractors".   Surely you, stalwart
> individualist that you are, would agree that there is something out there
> that "attracts you" to certain lines of behavior in social situations?
>
> Or perhaps not?
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
> Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 11:27 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Few of you ...
>
> Glen writes:
>
> < It's truly a breath of fresh air when I run across someone else who is
> willing to swap roles several times through a single conversation. >
>   
> Why do there have to be roles and not just topics?
>
> Marcus
>    
>
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