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<p>I appreciate the introduction of "roles" and "topics" and
"attractors" here. I would say that *I* experience all three
slightly differently:</p>
Roles: This subdivides into (roughly?) 3 modes<br>
<ol>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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...</li>
</ol>
<p>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:</p>
<ol>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Public. These things tend to fall into the arena of
(possibly well informed) opinions such as politics, religion,
aesthetic preferences, etc.</li>
<li>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.)</li>
</ol>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/15/19 12:20 PM, Nick Thompson
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:004801d4ad07$70253550$506f9ff0$@earthlink.net">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/">http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/</a>
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com">mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com</a>] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 11:27 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com"><friam@redfish.com></a>
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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