[FRIAM] Courtesy

Tue Mar 18 16:37:58 EDT 2025

Since others here are fond of posting the output of stochastic parrots, I'll do the same, albeit with a bit of chaining. I took my previous post, fed it to Claude (along with 2 iterates clarifying the context) and asked it to steelman my argument. I then took Claude's reformulation and fed it to Perplexity asking it to find sources that affirm and refute it. The result is a bit interesting, particularly for Perplexity's reference 4. Although that reference doesn't really seem like it's arguing that a resurgence of manners has occurred. It argues more along the lines of Know Your Meme and "code switching". It would be an interesting refutation of my (and Claude's) argument to say that courtesy, civility, and manners has ratcheted up a notch, meta-manners. I.e. be aware of which dynamic micro-contexts allow which idioms and rhetoric depth. This rings true for me. It's why old white guys who stumble into newly transformed hipster dive bars offend everyone in the bar and have no idea what just happened. In other words, it's *not* that civility has declined. But that it's *very* different from what it used to be.

Anyway, i've attached claude's steelman and perplexity's affirmation-refutation. Maybe next I'll feed Olberding's corpus into DeepSeek and see how it responds to her takes on Confucianism. >8^D

p.s. Sorry, Eric, for polluting the thread. But I just finished developing a workflow yesterday and needed a distraction.

On 3/18/25 11:39 AM, glen wrote:
> I'm torn, as usual. My favorite whipping post is "Bless her heart", a common insult from my neck of the woods. Being the dork that I am, I often miss the insults leveled my way. In many cases, the intention isn't to be rude but to poke fun in a socially constructive way.
> 
> To avoid focusing on the irony behind Nick's cartoon, I'll focus on a middle class shopper avoiding small, specific shops like butchers or tire shops and instead buying all their goods at Walmart (or Amazon). In order to really grok the moral of that condition, one has to unwind a LOT of tightly wound experiences. My inability to recognize when someone's making fun of me (either in a good- or ill-natured way) seems to have something to do with task switching.
> 
> It's always seemed to me the UK parliamentary "debates" involved more deeply layered rhetoric than our own punctuated discourse in Congress. My hypothesis here is: a facility with task switching allows one to parse those layers (seemingly) simultaneously. (To be clear, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. It's simulated through fast and fluid interleaving.)
> 
> Courtesy and civility can only be achieved by those who are capable of leveling criticism *within* the coarser layers of protocol. The rise of the "autism spectrum" in folk psychology is either causal *or* mostly a kind of laziness/efficiency/pragmatism ... a lack of facility for task switching.
> 
> A friend of mine is fond of saying "being poor is difficult" to indicate this generalized problem. Only relatively wealthy people have the resources to buy bread at the bakery, meat at the butcher, etc. The rest of us are so stressed and resource-poor (whether attention or whatever) that we *must* shop at Walmart or Amazon because we have no other option. We have to shave off every tiny bit of waste we can find just to stay sane (or survive).
> 
> And the ultra-wealthy *know* this. They spam us with bullshit (X/Twitter/LLMs), surround our cities with below-cost box stores to destroy businesses, destroy unions, lobby legislators up and down the spectrum, etc. They do this because they *know* we're resource poor. And we're approaching the point where none of us can afford to be courteous ... or at least we don't think we can afford it because our values and priorities have been so bent by the forcing structure they've trapped us in.
> 
> What to do? ... What to do.
> 
> On 3/18/25 10:25 AM, Santafe wrote:
>> Your second link is a good read, Glen, and Olberding looks a bit interesting from her homepage.
>>
>> In particular, her concern with courtesy as a functional and intentionally-maintained public good,
>> logo-fb-cbabd21f2fe6fcea8fc92abf268d5a4f1a9be2e0736375b2df5995bbf17915fe.png
>> Amy Olberding (University of Oklahoma) <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
>> philpeople.org <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
>>
>> <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
>> and her connection of it as one of the pillars of Confucianism, is one I have wanted to see made in scholarly work for a while.
>>
>> Thanks for these,
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 18, 2025, at 9:53, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Irony is dead. That some of us literally put money into Sam Altman's bank account by generating completely useless cartoons lamely attempting to criticize Altman's friend Trump [⛤] is ... what? ... what is that? Hypocrisy? Stupidity? Suicide?
>>>
>>> I don't have the words. [⛧] It's tantamount to the Leopards Ate My Face (LAMF) meme. The latest is of course liberals snacking on scenes of Trump voters regretting their vote (Vets losing their jobs, wives being deported, threats to SSA, etc.). But the source of the meme is as old as time. People don't vote in their best interests, with their dollar or at the ballot box. And people who use GPT to generate political cartoons from which the target of the cartoons profit is canonical.
>>>
>>> I suppose you just can't stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. C'est la vie.
>>>
>>>
>>> [⛤] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-hopes-donald-trump-build-new-ai-infrastructure-2025-1
>>>
>>> [⛧] For those of us who try to find words wherever we can, this may be interesting: https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2famysshadowbook.blogspot.com%2f2025%2f03%2fary-word.html&c=E,1,uf1PjNhQGYXt6eApisb5X8V3pACkTw2342Td_Sy3RRgsO3N7CpoBTd9582L_-lZ5y2WPmFC90kbBH_FAb8qfz7fXREyIo6K5khWzn2D7&typo=1
>>>
>>> On 3/17/25 5:30 PM, steve smith wrote:
>>>> Nick:
>>>> As you may know already, we are peas in a pod.   I remind everyone here gently from time to time in various ways to use their <delete> keys with my missives of questionable merit.
>>>> As I age (grow more wise, more complex, more ??) I recognize that my ideations (too much encouraged/supplemented these days by my bar friend GPT) are perhaps "all over the place" relative to other's sensibilities.
>>>> When I saw your (and George's) cartoon, I had a sense of "I guess I had to be there", which is why I offered you my parsing.... even though we all know that "a joke should never be explained"...
>>>> I also know (from bits of feedback from various quarters) that fractions of my nonsense are parsed and appreciated but not (publicly) acknowledged.   I think you should continue (as you do) to share what you might, as you must...  even to deafening silence?
>>>> :Steve
>>>>> Steve, and others,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for taking the meme idea seriously for a moment.   I have these moments of giddiness in which an idea just seems so good that the world must have it.   I actually imagined that my inbox would be full of copies of my own cartoon sent to me by people  who did not know its source. Crazy as a loon, I know it, but they are wonderful moments, and I could not write [live?] without them.  Narcissism Unbounded.   Thanks for playing along.
>>>>>
>>>>> Nick
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>    It seems to me they haven’t this through so good. Thousands of NIH, NSF, and DOE funded scientists out on the international market.  Add to that reduced regulation on advanced scientific equipment and services.  Augment with a general sense of doom and self-interest and alienation from their country of origin.   Sounds like a recipe for foreign-based companies to scoop them up, if not other governments.   I won’t suggest particulars, but I think it is obvious how this could result in bad outcomes.
>>>>>>
>>>>>    My molecular biologist daughter is in the breach/sights of this nonsense.   She dedicated her career to 3rd-world focused virology (flavi like West Nile, Dingue, Zika) and is now faced with the triple-whammy of reduced funding/interest in third-world problems, reduced *health* funding, and the spirit that suggests as a woman in science she might somehow have gotten her funding through DEI biases.    She is not a candidate for "defecting" to China or Russia in this context but has been made crazy by watching her mid-career colleagues defect from academic research to profit-focused big pharma.   She got pulled off Flavi's to chase Coronas for a year or more because her institution had more  funding than they could spend and her funding was a little more fungible...    I think she can (probably) hang in there through the current storm (years) but not clear and it might actually be better for her (career) to move to a European Institution (though I don't know if that is
>>>>>    even possible given what EricS suggested about demand/supply.
>>>>>
>>>>>    After the fall of the Soviet Union, I participated in a brief project reviewing US State Dept proposals by (former) Soviet scientists seeking an alternative to becomeing rogue nuclear scientists for who knows?    Seems like we are about to have our own problem of that nature?
>>>>>
>>> -- 

-- 
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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The Attention Economy and Civil Decline: A Reformulated Argument

Thesis

The degradation of courtesy and civility in contemporary society stems from a systemic deficit in cognitive bandwidth—specifically our capacity for task-switching—which has been progressively eroded by the transition to an information-based economy and accelerated by digital technology. This cognitive deficit manifests across economic, social, and infrastructural dimensions of civil society.
Foundation: The Cognitive Basis of Civility

Civility is fundamentally a cognitive luxury. Complex social protocols—ranging from layered rhetoric in parliamentary debate to subtle conversational nuance like irony or teasing—require rapid, fluid task-switching between content, context, social cues, and multiple levels of meaning. This cognitive flexibility is the prerequisite for maintaining sophisticated social codes that balance criticism with respect, disagreement with decorum.
Historical Transformation

The transition from industrial to informational civilization represents a watershed moment in human attention dynamics:

    Pre-Digital Information Environment: While information processing has always been part of human societies, earlier periods maintained natural boundaries on input. Even elite discourse (parliamentary debate, academic exchange) operated within cognitive limits that allowed for attentional depth.
    Digital Acceleration: The advent of smartphones, social media, and omnipresent connectivity created not merely a quantitative but a qualitative shift in our attentional environment. We now process more information in a day than our ancestors did in months, with constant context-switching becoming the default mode of cognition.

The Wealth-Attention Nexus

What I term "wealth" encompasses not merely financial resources but a comprehensive pool of cognitive, temporal, educational, and social capital. This wealth directly corresponds to one's capacity for task-switching and attention management:

    Attention Poverty: Just as financial poverty forces economic triage, cognitive poverty forces attentional triage. When constantly operating at the limits of cognitive bandwidth, individuals must ruthlessly prioritize efficiency over social elaboration.
    Institutional Exploitation: Power structures recognize and exploit this attentional vulnerability. Corporate and political entities deliberately create information environments that exhaust cognitive resources, making critical thinking and social complexity prohibitively "expensive."

Manifestations Across Systems

This attentional poverty manifests in multiple interconnected domains:

    Interpersonal Relations: The decline of nuanced conversation, the rise of literal interpretation, and the flattening of rhetorical complexity all reflect diminished capacity for cognitive task-switching.
    Commercial Behavior: The shift to one-stop shopping at Walmart or Amazon represents not merely economic efficiency but cognitive efficiency—conserving limited attentional resources by reducing context-switching between different commercial environments.
    Infrastructure and Community: The design of unwalkable, fragmented communities further taxes our cognitive resources through increased planning burden, reduced spontaneous interaction, and community disconnection.
    Self-Understanding: The rising self-identification with attention-related conditions ("I'm probably on the spectrum") represents a cultural recognition of this cognitive strain, as people seek explanatory frameworks for their increasing difficulty managing layered social interactions.

Implications

The ultimate cost is not merely rudeness but a fundamental reshaping of civil society. When courtesy becomes an unaffordable cognitive luxury, we see:

    The replacement of complex social feedback mechanisms with blunt, binary reactions
    The atrophy of institutional practices requiring sustained attention and nuanced interpretation
    The degradation of physical and social infrastructure that once supported attentional well-being
    The widening gap between those who can afford the cognitive luxury of civility and those who cannot

This is not simply nostalgia for a more polite era but recognition that the architecture of civil society—from interpersonal courtesy to physical community design—depends on our collective capacity for cognitive flexibility, a capacity now under unprecedented strain.

-------------- next part --------------
The following is an explanation and argument for the reduction in courtesy and civility in society. Provide citations that both affirm and refute the argument

The argument presented in the search results suggests that the decline in courtesy and civility in modern society is primarily due to a systemic deficit in cognitive bandwidth, exacerbated by the transition to an information-based economy and accelerated by digital technology[^1]. This argument can be both supported and challenged by various points from the search results:

Supporting Evidence

1. Cognitive Basis of Civility: The argument posits that civility requires cognitive flexibility and task-switching abilities, which are being eroded by information overload[^1]. This is supported by research showing that:
  - Average workers spend 28% of their time managing emails[^3].
  - People check their phones an average of 221 times per day[^3].
  - Information overload leads to a loss of control over professional and personal lives, creating undue stress[^3].
2. Impact of Rudeness: Studies have shown that rudeness significantly impacts cognitive bandwidth:
  - When someone is rude to you, your cognitive bandwidth reduces by 61%[^2].
  - Witnessing rudeness towards others reduces cognitive bandwidth by 20%[^2].
  - Incivility makes people 50% less likely to help others[^2].
3. Digital Age Challenges: The rise of digital communication has created new challenges for maintaining civility:
  - Social media and instant messaging have blurred the lines between public and private discourse[^4].
  - The lack of face-to-face interaction has led to a decline in empathy and understanding in communication[^4].

Refuting Evidence

1. Resurgence of Manners: Contrary to the argument of declining civility, there is evidence of a resurgence of manners in modern society:
  - Traditional manners are intersecting with new communication norms in the digital age[^4].
  - There is a growing recognition of the importance of manners in guiding respectful and mindful interactions, even in the digital realm[^4].
2. Digital Civility Initiatives: Efforts are being made to improve digital civility:
  - The Digital Civility Index (DCI) has been established to measure the overall tone of interactions in the digital landscape[^6].
  - There is an increasing focus on teaching digital citizenship and responsible use of technology[^6].
3. Addressing Bandwidth Depletion: While the argument focuses on the negative impacts of cognitive bandwidth depletion, there are also efforts to address this issue:
  - Educational institutions are recognizing the need to preserve and restore cognitive capacity lost to uncertainty or feelings of not belonging[^5].
  - There is growing awareness of the "bandwidth tax" imposed by various societal factors, and efforts are being made to address these issues[^5].

In conclusion, while there is substantial evidence supporting the argument that cognitive bandwidth depletion contributes to a decline in civility, there are also indications of efforts to counteract this trend and promote digital civility in modern society.

[^1]: claudes-argument.txt
[^2]: https://ipdf.shinetechpaperless.com/api/GetResourceFileById/5068
[^3]: https://www.alphaomegaalpha.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2016-4-Byyny.pdf
[^4]: https://vocal.media/education/the-resurgence-of-manners-in-modern-society-a-reflection-on-civility
[^5]: https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/articles/battle-of-the-bandwidth
[^6]: https://navigate360.com/blog/digital-civility-improve-with-4-ideas/
[^7]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-28098-x
[^8]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificamericanmind0114-58.pdf
[^9]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5089744/
[^10]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5006039/
[^11]: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/how-to-create-culture-civility
[^12]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8536330/
[^13]: https://delibdemjournal.org/article/id/959/
[^14]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/civility-decline-steven-mintz-aka-ethics-sage
[^15]: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/11/05/2023/do-digital-technologies-benefit-governments-or-empower-civil-society-actors