[FRIAM] merging with the mob

[Nick Thompson]

Apologies for arriving late at the party and then quibbling, but .... I assume we all agree that not all groups of people with a common set of values and interests are "mobs".  As I wrote in a 

BRILLIANT POST

…a week or so back, not all group thought is Group Think.  To believe otherwise is libertarian GroupThink.  

 

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 ? u???
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2018 9:05 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] merging with the mob

 

On 01/25/2018 05:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> My take is that they wanted someone that would project into their (lower dimensional) tribal space in a seamless way.   It was an important part of how they got along.  

>    

> You alluded to collective measures of fitness.   A progressive’s measure of fitness is not unlike Shannon entropy – let a thousand flowers bloom.   A conservative, however, fears that entropy will be too costly and that people will forget previous fit strategies.   In principle, maximizing entropy could push out cultural norms since that is copied information.  Imagine a finite length bit string representing a program where skills related to football were sacrificed for skills related to curling or dancing (or more esoteric topics).  If you think that the available bit string is short, that then one might worry about locally (or universally) promoting the `right’ cultural information in order for people to get along.

 

That's a great way to characterize the individualist vs. communitarian dichotomy.  But I still think it's too false.  The available bit string is so large it may as well be infinite.  I could go further, I think, and assert that it's binned so thoroughly (hierarchically even) that it might as well not even be a discrete list at all.  But what I'm going to say doesn't depend on the continuity of that machine.

 

If the "metaphors everywhere" people are right, then it's reasonable to infer learning to use football as social grease would be trivial as long as the learner already has *some* form of grease.  E.g. if one's used to schmoozing with colleagues in terms of ballroom dancing, that person can learn just enough of the rules and norms of football fans (and to whatever extent necessary, of the game, players, owners, etc.) and map that schema onto their extant ballroom dancing schema.  We can do that analogizing because our "bit string" is reflective, parts of the bit string turn on or off other parts of it, chunk parts of it, etc.  Of course, some domains select for different types of machine.

 

The real trick, I think, lies in whether "conservatism" assumes less adaptability. Neoliberals, typically called "conservative" these days, should be comfortable with high entropy strategies because a tactic that emerged before will *re-emerge* if it's still appropriate.  But authoritarian conservatives probably wouldn't.  Similar binning can occur on the progressive's side.  Those football fans you met with are probably a bit authoritarian, regardless of whether they're progressive or conservative, ultimately.

 

Regardless of all my rhetoric, though, I think I see the point.  A highly adaptive person may find it easy and good to sometimes merge with the mob, then decouple for awhile, then merge with another mob, etc.  But a less adaptive person may accidentally *fall* into some form of groupthink and never find the opportunity to escape. That reduces my point to one of "be careful of falling into the groupthink trap that is individualism".

 

--

∄ uǝʃƃ

 

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