[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -
> Anyway, if my speculation is close, then Trump doesn't intend or WANT to communicate or persuade, only to perform.
I do believe that this describes his intentions (as best I can tell from 
outside and far away).   I think he believes that he *is* persuasive 
just by his presence/nature and that there is no need to communicate 
anything excepting his authority.   To quote a couple of Austrian 
bodybuilders "hear me now and believe me later" seems to be his style?
> And the tight weave thing was definitely a compliment, and very much on the topic of speaking with language that hangs together and can communicate/persuade, even if *you* don't intend or want to. 8^)

While I know this was tongue ^ in cheek ) , I think this type of forum 
and the personal style of each of us as "communicators" is very 
interesting.   On the surface, I would claim that *of course I want to 
communicate!*.   I'm not always interested in "persuading" because I 
feel that my "audience" (the subset of the forum that hears me now, 
whether they believe me later or not) is capable of coming to their own 
conclusions and rightly so.  In fact, I would say "persuasive" modes 
interfere with "communication".  For the most part, I don't think anyone 
here is significantly motivated to "persuade".

There are other motivations than simple communication and persuasion 
practiced here, including "to entertain", "to ask for help", "to offer 
support/perspective", and "to express/vent".   By and large, this is a 
very civil and knowledgeable online community.   The biggest challenges 
I recognize for us are: A) too few active voices (~dozen?); B) too 
little diversity (voices mostly white males over 50?); C) not enough 
explicit Complexity Science discussion.

I can't say how much I appreciate it when a new or infrequent voice 
(Jackie Kazil most recently) speaks up... our raucous discussions often 
seem to continue on over these new/unique voices and I wish we were 
better at including/encouraging them without being awkward about it 
(like this very sentence?).

Since I tend to be pretty herky-jerky in my posting (especially of 
late), I feel a little conspicuous when I go on a riff of 
posts/responses like this current one.   I do trust that many here have 
me in their TL;DR filter (explicit or implicit) already so I'm at worst 
a minor nuisance to them.  For what it is worth, most of the time I'm 
silent, I've possibly composed as many as several replies each day but 
never sent because I was either interrupted and when I came back to 
them, just didn't feel the urge to complete them, or my 
self-consciousness over not wanting to add noise over signal overwhelms 
my need to compulsively express my opinion on just about everything 
posited here.

- Steve

>
> On 1/11/19 11:43 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> As a compulsive intuitive modeler of "everything" as a network/field dual, all this resonates well.  I also like your characterization as "gooey colloid" and was reminded of JJ Thompson's Plum-Pudding model of atoms.
>>
>> I also like your action/consideration dual to rights/responsibilities... sort of a verb/noun or active/passive duality?
>>
>> Regarding the use of the term "effectivity".   I long ago began to rephrase statements using "good" with similar statements being "effective".   e.g. "Science is good at X" with "Science is effective for addressing the topic/problem/question of X".   The key point is to replace an absolute value judgement with a more contextualized and relative one.
>>
>> If Trump claimed "A Physical Barrier like a Concrete Wall or a Beautifully Artistic Steel Slatted Fence is particularly effective in helping personnel in charge of maintaining border security stop the casual crossing of the border without appropriate inspection of cargo and entry documents" rather than the variety of simpleton dumbass claims he *does make*, he would A) put most people to sleep; B) be part of a constructive conversation toward improving the effectiveness of our southern national border.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> PS.  Thanks for the (underhanded?) complement on my "tight weave".   I started to claim that I don't *intend* to make the discourse more difficult to analyze, then I realized, that I probably DO intend to prevent the context of any given conversation from being trivialized or made degenerate for the sake of clarity over meaning.