[FRIAM] projection propaganda

Prof David West profwest at fastmail.fm
Tue Jul 8 08:33:50 EDT 2025 

RE: Alexander, I have written a lot about him over the years, and had many discussions with Jenny Quillien and Richard Gabriel, both of whom worked with him, as well as dozens of others in the Patterns community. My take has always been he is deeply conflicted—a "mystic" (true believer Catholic) who strives to be a "scientist" (daddy issues). His early work either made both sides explicit (*Notes on the Synthesis of Form*) or separated them (*A Pattern Language*, T*he Timeless Way of Building*) but in his last works he jury rigs a synthesis: it is science all the way down until it becomes the ineffable God.

davew

On Mon, Jul 7, 2025, at 7:51 PM, steve smith wrote:
> I suspect Leonardo was documenting his work as much for himself as to provide it in language "others could understand"?   As it turns out, we moderns find his form of expression fairly accessible, but I don't know he was writing for us, definitely not for the "normies" of his time/culture who mostly probably were functionally illiterate? 
> 
> And his patrons...  maybe some of them were all over his writing/notebooks, but I'm not sure...  some seemed to be clearly "pitches", others seemed to be for "posterity" in the reflexive sense that he apparently was very influenced by the classics such as Galen's work and might have felt an urge to be read by another a millenium later the way he read Galen?
> 
> I found his works to be a stellar example of creative metacognition?  I can cast lots of other iconic texts in that light (because it is appealing to me, not because it is accurate):  Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu (both obviously had courtly and military audiences?  But they were also useful "thinking out loud"?)
> 
> I find both Wolfram and (the later works of) Christopher Alexander to be in the ambiguous space where  I don't think they were trying to talk over or past my head, even though ultimately much of their loftier things do go past/over me.   Will another culture a millenium (hah!) from now read their work and say "duh!" and "clever for such primitive humans!"?
> 
> I am trying to extract some signal from the discussion here that would be (acutely?) relevant to my own thoughts about collective vs individual (or small-group?) identity, conception, ideation, emotion (even)?  
> 
> Some collectivizing is faint-metaphor in the sense I feel a lot of Lakoff's political treatise:
> 
>> *Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think - 1996/revised 2002*
>> 
> but I feel that part/whole transfer is not always conflation?
> 
> Glad to see the conversation continuing...
> 
> - Steve
> 
> 
> On 7/7/25 6:28 PM, Prof David West wrote:
>> I had thought of Leonardo because of the mirror-writing and the absence of students or followers — despite his own education in a robust bodega.
>> 
>> But then I thought of Newton—kind of the epitome of a scientist—who was an avowed alchemist and Egyptologist; pretty mystical stuff. Or Jung and Pauli and synchronicity. Seems to get pretty messy, pretty fast. But that has always been a facet of you being an iconoclast.
>> 
>> davew
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Jul 7, 2025, at 12:26 PM, glen wrote:
>>> I would say no because he took great pains to "write" down his ideas in 
>>> "language" others can understand ... even broaching aesthetics. My 
>>> target was more towards the gurus like Eric Weistein or Stephen Wolfram 
>>> who give some lip service to writing things down, but don't really care 
>>> if us normies can keep up or not. And pulling the normies along in your 
>>> wake *is* science. No wake, no science.
>>> 
>>> Of course, that doesn't mean people like Charles Manson or Jim Jones 
>>> were scientists. Non-scientists can populate their wakes, too. The wake 
>>> is necessary but not sufficient.
>>> 
>>> On 7/7/25 10:18 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>>>> Curiosity, re science communication—was Leonardo da Vinci a mystic?
>>>> 
>>>> davew
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Mon, Jul 7, 2025, at 10:14 AM, glen wrote:
>>>>> So if I read the "research" part correctly, the more complex (social)
>>>>> structure allows them to read organismal expression as a signal/symbol
>>>>> and avoid the fighting that would otherwise occur in the simpler
>>>>> (social) structure.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Specifically to Eric's question: "is it the reality, or the heavy
>>>>> weight on metaphors ...?" This came to me this morning:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Bram Vaassen (Umeå University), "Mental Causation for Standard Dualists"
>>>>> https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/bram-vaassen-umea-university-mental
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'd claim it needn't be either the reality of such compositions nor the
>>>>> reliance upon the metaphor that needs demonstrating, at least to us
>>>>> lumpers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters>. What
>>>>> needs demonstrating is that those of us who do overly rely on metaphor
>>>>> are *capable* of concretizing/literalizing our metaphors when necessary.
>>>>> 
>>>>> E.g. if some pundit claims the US is projecting ("engaging in
>>>>> projection propaganda") when it accuses Russia or China of some
>>>>> motivation, a good interlocutor will damage the flow of conversation
>>>>> and test whether the pundit can restate their claim more
>>>>> concretely/literally. Another e.g. might be peri-entropy metaphors. >8^D
>>>>> 
>>>>> It seems to me this skill (the ability to walk up and down the metaphor
>>>>> stack) is critical to good science and especially science communication
>>>>> [⛧]. Here's me testing the waters for "projection propaganda": Going
>>>>> back to using the more literal as signals in the meta-game, the set of
>>>>> behaviors surrounding patriotism et al have always seemed to me like
>>>>> markers identifying people as uncomfortable in their own skin. And
>>>>> there, Trump's crowd is the paper tiger, where Putin's and Jinping's
>>>>> crowds have the advantage. I'm still on the fence re: Musk, though.
>>>>> Vitamin K may lend you some organismal at-homeness. The primary damage
>>>>> Trump's crowd is doing to the US lies in making us as uncomfortable in
>>>>> our skin as they are ... We're being infected with his TACO cowardice
>>>>> because we're less and less coherent about who and what we are (even if
>>>>> whatever we thought we were was a fiction).
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> [⛧] Full disclosure, I believe science communication is more primitive
>>>>> than science. If you can't enlist/coerce others to your methods, then
>>>>> you're not doing science. The lone genius working on her "science" and
>>>>> whose notes forever remain encrypted nonsense, is nothing but a mystic,
>>>>> even if it tracks perfectly with reality.
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 7/3/25 1:10 PM, Santafe wrote:
>>>>>> I don’t know that it holds up, or furnishes evidence, but it seems to me our common language is strewn with metaphors showing that people cognize groups as if they are individuals, whether or not they actually would deserve it under a proper composition.  I will give examples in a moment.  But first a bit of something that was research:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Before he became America’s Morality Guide, Jonathan Haidt did some work that I liked, looking at the language around social emotions, and arguing that it still showed explicitly metaphorical marks of its origins in body sensations.  The cases I remember are things like social uses of “disgust”, which of course uses the roots for being (literally) food-sick.  Haidt had a list of these, which he argued showed a common pattern, going from the more embodied-concrete to the social-abstract.  It seems to me like i remember Jessica Flack’s making arguments of a similar sort within comparative primatology, for embodied actions, like grimacing, grooming, or things of that sort.  That they are early attested in primate groups in concrete contexts, like aggression and submission, and then keep their form while mediating more abstract categories (in this case, more stable social roles) of dominance and subordination, in primate branches that seem to have more hierarchy in the social structure and more complexity it its categories.  The difference being stark: that in the aggression/submission dichotomy, these are behaviors that occur when fights happen, as parts of settling their outcome short of one of the fighters incapacitating or killing the other, whereas dominance/subordination are social roles that head off fights, by acting as if their outcome has already been established without actually having the fight.  (the _actual_ function of the lightning rod, which precludes lightning strikes, as contrasted with its common-language gloss, which people think of as drawing them to itself).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Anyway, the obvious examples that everybody knows, in language:
>>>>>> Patriotism and Fatherland
>>>>>> Mother tongue
>>>>>> Alma Mater
>>>>>> I have a sense of knowing there are another 1 or 2 that use explicit family-words that I am not remembering.  There was a time when I was alert to these things, and seemed to have a running list of maybe a dozen such expressions.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> So the question of whether individual behaviors _actually do_ compose to group-level phenomena while preserving their type is a legitimate one, and the thing that micro-to-macro in economist most relies on and doesn’t generally fulfill.  But for the projection effect Glen talks about below, is it the reality, or the heavy weight on metaphors in people’s reception that needs to be demonstrated?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> This seems like Nick’s bread and butter, and also an area where EricC can inject some much needed professional criticality.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Eric
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On Jul 4, 2025, at 0:34, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I'm used to interpersonal projection. E.g. Joe Rogan's supplements vs. his accusations re the mRNA vaccines:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Rogan's Big Pharma Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder
>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/bogYSu3cCLg?si=U1Jk93n5DC4gppdx
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> But I'm not habituated to the analogy of projection ("lady doth protest too much") to national/party scale propaganda:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Projection as an Interpersonal Influence Tactic: The Effects of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black
>>>>>>> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672012711010
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I expect man-babies like Trump to accuse their targets of their own misdeeds (https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ftheconversation.com%2fwhy-trump-accuses-people-of-wrongdoing-he-himself-committed-an-explanation-of-projection-237912&c=E,1,dsyRQszQSTlWaQaHOPF40m7xy43QaKWsPNAEXRnHbHFzA8jfwedUvqHsFVDlkQsR_FZO1zlBJ7LxxE8JR1bS_27IDlBZq91dUf32AtMWDN86gTzHCFEyuxQs&typo=1). And to the extent that the right in the US (including SCOTUS) believe in and achieve the unitary executive, the analogy between interpersonal projection and national or group projection will be more accurate. This is one reason why "projection propaganda" worked well for Russia and China but not so much for the US, because the difference in scope between an individual and a regime was smaller there than here in the US.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> So given that one of my whipping posts is that we bear the burden of showing how group behavior composes from individual behavior before we assert that the map is in any way coherent, I can't use "projection propaganda" without coming up with that composition. If any of you historians or journalists have any clue sticks to hit me with, I'd very much appreciate it.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>> -- 
>>> -- 
>>> ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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