[FRIAM] Few of you ...

[Prof David West]

"Roles, topics, and attractors"  = Culture.

For me, Steven's comments and the conversation that ensued, pretty much
explain the kind of "analysis"  and "explanation" found in Cultural
Anthropology 101.
"Attractors," again from my perspective, would be cross-cultural
'patterns'. Examples of these patterns would be the three forms of
reciprocity (generalized, balanced, and negative - with markets being a
sub-type of either balanced [very rare] or negative); or marriage
(polygyny [70+% of cultures], serial monogamy [29.9% of cultures], and
polyandry [less than a dozen cultures].
I see a kind of simplicity here that may or may not be consistent with
the heavy thinking evident in the discussion.
davew 




On Tue, Jan 15, 2019, at 1:13 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 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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