Been a while since I posted anything here - so, I've been thinking about communication...
I think that when we talk with someone else, we are communicating in one (or often more) of five modalities of speech. There may be more - and I'm certainly welcome to change/expand the theory.
1) "Information Exchange" - it's about getting information from one person to another (or group). It may or may not involve iteration and feedback to clarify.
"I'd like a bean and cheese burrito"
"Would you like a drink with that?"
"No thanks"
"That will be $3.86"
Effective exchange between two people, requires an acknowledgement that the information was received - so a response here is important. Of course, information, doesn't have to be factual. It can be opinions, hearsay, etc.
2) "Affecting Change" - this mode is where the end goal is to modify (or in some cases affirm or question) someones opinion, behavior, choice or actions. It might be used to get someone to purchase something, for them to take on a new task, to change their sweaty shirt, or opinion. The intent may be for immediate change, or long term change - so response may or may not be expected. Often, this leads to debate/argument which includes lots of "Information Exchange".
3) "Social Protocol" - this is the "Hi, how are you today?". "I'm fine. You?". This is mostly a social acknowledgement of other peoples presence. There isn't an assumed "Information exchange" in most cases - you might be having a rotten day, but you understand that the intent of this protocol is just an ACK so you would likely still respond "fine" unless it's important to operate in another mode.
4) "Story" - this model is about relating personal experience or narrative, with the focus typically being on the larger themes, rather than the specific details. It probably wouldn't matter if the story being related took place on a Wednesday or a Thursday, or if the persons shirt were green or red (and questioning or correcting on these non-central theme details demeans the value of the central story). What maters is the grand scope and central theme(s) of the story. The intent of telling the story may be egoic amusement ("When I was a kid..."), sharing a lesson learned or warning heeded ("This one time when I was on a fishing trip..."), or relating a collection of observations ("Wow, I've gotta say the Amalfi Coast in Italy is so lovely..."). When someone is telling a story, it's generally polite to "listen", without trying to either correct, or co-opt the conversation, and make it your own story...
5) "Emotional Connection" - here, the intent is in building and/or maintaining (or in some cases lessening) the connection with another person. "How are you today?" here might get a "I'm having a really hard day - the cat barfed on my comforter, my boss just changed the specifications again, and..." Because the main purpose here is connection, the information content is often secondary, and often has elements of "Story" - where it's better to listen to hear, rather than listen to reply.
Many conversations will have more than one of the above - for instance, to affect change, one would hope that there is some information exchange. Likewise, many stories have elements of information exchange.
Thoughts??
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Sunday, May 3, 2015
More thoughts on thought
It's been a long time since I've posted anything out in the blog space, but I've had variations on this conversation several times in the last couple of weeks, and it feels like I should put this out there.
We experience this existence through the filters of both our physical bodies, and through the manifold emotional, social and experiential filters which we've picked up along the way, the mood which we are in, the motivations of the moment.
Because our brains are finite, their ability to sense, and make sense, to figure out what box to put something in allows us to determine what to do with it, how to respond to it, and easily file it into memory, if it's deemed important enough to do so. Is it important? Does it represent a threat? Can we eat it? Will it help me?
From the earliest moments of consciousness, we take the data which are senses provide, and create connections between those external events, and our internal state. When it is hot, my body feels uncomfortable in this particular way. When there is an unexpected loud noise, a whole cascade of things happen, adrenals, increasing pulse, breath rate, pupil dilation - one of the many triggers that put us into a "fight or flight" mode. Some of the responses we can learn to control with time and training. Someone who works in construction, for instance, get used to unexpected loud noises.
As we grow, and gain experiences, we make more connections. We decide ways that things are "like" other things, and "unlike" yet other ones. We categorize. We discriminate. That word - the "d" word - has a negative connotation now days. But it means to recognize a distinction - to be able to select one thing from another. It is actually how we work. You need to be able to discriminate between edible and inedible things, or you will get very sick, very quickly. Adding more experiences gives us the ability to further group things into larger classes, onto which we apply labels.
Labels are ways to compress an experience - we have the compressed song in our head, under the label of "The Happy Birthday Song", which we are able to reproduce on a moment notice, including the modification of the "name tag" in the song to the appropriate recipient. But something like our compressed mental image of "The Mona Lisa" is, for most people, much more abstract. There is a woman with an almost smile. Is she facing left or right? Is she holding anything? Is there anything in the background? This is a "lossy compression" - we discard bits and pieces of the details which at the time the memory was stored, the brain didn't think was important.
The trick here is that the labels are our own creation, as is the definition of what belongs in the box which we have applied that label to, and the metric for compression. When we apply a label to something, so many things happen - we of course assume that we have applied the correct label, and that allows us to think that we "know" that thing, because we have given it a name. Interestingly, this also shapes how we can see the thing - because we have applied a label, our expectations are that this thing will behave like other members of that label class.
One of the signs of an "open" mind, is the ability to allow for the possibility that we there is something wrong with any label that has been applied. It is easier to lump more things into less labels, than create new labels. Perhaps this thing is similar to other things in a lot of ways, but is fundamentally different in some other crucial way. If it is a bowl, that has holes in it, we call it a strainer or colendar. Is it still a bowl? Well, if you are carrying large things, sure. But if you want to eat cereal in it, no. So perhaps we need a new label altogether. But that makes us think - what other things should be in that label - is a window screen a colendar?
Someone who is "discriminatory" (with today's negative "d" word connotation) is someone who doesn't allow for flexibility in the definition or membership in their labels. Interestingly, in my experience, people who are discriminatory, tend to not only stereotype people, but also, their label definition often has a primarily negative trait bias to it...
So, labels are both powerful and useful things, and also can be things that take away power, and disregard the utility of things in their application. They can empower, by allowing people to quickly communicate concepts through generalities, but they can also lead to assumptions that may be different from intention - and thus dis-empowering. When I say "I live in a house in the city", different people will have different pictures for what a "house" is, and what the "city" looks like. Depending on what I am trying to get across, the images created in someones mind whom lives in a a ramshackle hut in an over run urban core, vs. someone living in a gentrified area will be very different. Yet, both images are compatible with their individual, contextual labels.
If labels are so problematic, can we work without them?
Since we think by association, we are wired for labels. I think the best we can do is to KNOW that is how we work, and make efforts, where appropriate, to atomize the labels as widely as possible - while having the upper level ideas connect back to as many other labels as reasonable. Doing so, allows one to work from both the space of unique qualities, and shared ones.
Labels let us work with things on different scales. If we try to find a metaphoric label for stories in our lives, we can use that compression to great value. If we imagine that a relationship that didn't work out is like a dead rose, we can mentally interact with that rose - which contains a compressed copy of the entire history of the relationship - from a different level. We can, for instance, realize that a dead rose is beyond hope, beyond repair, and decide to just "throw it out", much more easily then we might be able to disconnect from the specific details of a long term human relationship.
Ok, rambling a bit here, but I felt compelled...
And if you've made it this far, thanks for listening. You have been added to the "good egg" label :)
We experience this existence through the filters of both our physical bodies, and through the manifold emotional, social and experiential filters which we've picked up along the way, the mood which we are in, the motivations of the moment.
Because our brains are finite, their ability to sense, and make sense, to figure out what box to put something in allows us to determine what to do with it, how to respond to it, and easily file it into memory, if it's deemed important enough to do so. Is it important? Does it represent a threat? Can we eat it? Will it help me?
From the earliest moments of consciousness, we take the data which are senses provide, and create connections between those external events, and our internal state. When it is hot, my body feels uncomfortable in this particular way. When there is an unexpected loud noise, a whole cascade of things happen, adrenals, increasing pulse, breath rate, pupil dilation - one of the many triggers that put us into a "fight or flight" mode. Some of the responses we can learn to control with time and training. Someone who works in construction, for instance, get used to unexpected loud noises.
As we grow, and gain experiences, we make more connections. We decide ways that things are "like" other things, and "unlike" yet other ones. We categorize. We discriminate. That word - the "d" word - has a negative connotation now days. But it means to recognize a distinction - to be able to select one thing from another. It is actually how we work. You need to be able to discriminate between edible and inedible things, or you will get very sick, very quickly. Adding more experiences gives us the ability to further group things into larger classes, onto which we apply labels.
Labels are ways to compress an experience - we have the compressed song in our head, under the label of "The Happy Birthday Song", which we are able to reproduce on a moment notice, including the modification of the "name tag" in the song to the appropriate recipient. But something like our compressed mental image of "The Mona Lisa" is, for most people, much more abstract. There is a woman with an almost smile. Is she facing left or right? Is she holding anything? Is there anything in the background? This is a "lossy compression" - we discard bits and pieces of the details which at the time the memory was stored, the brain didn't think was important.
The trick here is that the labels are our own creation, as is the definition of what belongs in the box which we have applied that label to, and the metric for compression. When we apply a label to something, so many things happen - we of course assume that we have applied the correct label, and that allows us to think that we "know" that thing, because we have given it a name. Interestingly, this also shapes how we can see the thing - because we have applied a label, our expectations are that this thing will behave like other members of that label class.
One of the signs of an "open" mind, is the ability to allow for the possibility that we there is something wrong with any label that has been applied. It is easier to lump more things into less labels, than create new labels. Perhaps this thing is similar to other things in a lot of ways, but is fundamentally different in some other crucial way. If it is a bowl, that has holes in it, we call it a strainer or colendar. Is it still a bowl? Well, if you are carrying large things, sure. But if you want to eat cereal in it, no. So perhaps we need a new label altogether. But that makes us think - what other things should be in that label - is a window screen a colendar?
Someone who is "discriminatory" (with today's negative "d" word connotation) is someone who doesn't allow for flexibility in the definition or membership in their labels. Interestingly, in my experience, people who are discriminatory, tend to not only stereotype people, but also, their label definition often has a primarily negative trait bias to it...
So, labels are both powerful and useful things, and also can be things that take away power, and disregard the utility of things in their application. They can empower, by allowing people to quickly communicate concepts through generalities, but they can also lead to assumptions that may be different from intention - and thus dis-empowering. When I say "I live in a house in the city", different people will have different pictures for what a "house" is, and what the "city" looks like. Depending on what I am trying to get across, the images created in someones mind whom lives in a a ramshackle hut in an over run urban core, vs. someone living in a gentrified area will be very different. Yet, both images are compatible with their individual, contextual labels.
If labels are so problematic, can we work without them?
Since we think by association, we are wired for labels. I think the best we can do is to KNOW that is how we work, and make efforts, where appropriate, to atomize the labels as widely as possible - while having the upper level ideas connect back to as many other labels as reasonable. Doing so, allows one to work from both the space of unique qualities, and shared ones.
Labels let us work with things on different scales. If we try to find a metaphoric label for stories in our lives, we can use that compression to great value. If we imagine that a relationship that didn't work out is like a dead rose, we can mentally interact with that rose - which contains a compressed copy of the entire history of the relationship - from a different level. We can, for instance, realize that a dead rose is beyond hope, beyond repair, and decide to just "throw it out", much more easily then we might be able to disconnect from the specific details of a long term human relationship.
Ok, rambling a bit here, but I felt compelled...
And if you've made it this far, thanks for listening. You have been added to the "good egg" label :)
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
The Rose
As my father continues his slow decline, there are those moments where interesting stories bubble to the surface. At a recent lunch, he was sitting next to an elderly woman, and reached out and took her hand. She said "I like that", he replied "I like you!", "And I like you too". A simple, pure exchange of joy at a moment of life, so far out of character from the person that I knew as my father, but deep inside, there was this thing that finally came to the surface, this gentle touch and joy. It made me contemplate the rose...
The Rose
To say "Rose", brings forth the image of the flower, opened in its full splendor, or a tight bud, barely breaking into bloom; fragrant essence wafting in the breeze, its stamen dotted with pollen, its stem armored with tines.
But the flower could not be without the bush, almost forgotten in its stoic functionality. The years of growing, pushing the roots into the earth to gather up the damp, the nutrient, spreading leaves into the sun to collect the dappled rays, vines going out and up, thorns to ward off those that would try their luck at a tasty leaf. If it were not for the flower, this bush would be a weed - pulled out and discarded, a bramble, a nuisance.
The flowers are the culmination of growth. The tiny buds so tightly wrapped that one could scarcely imagine the wonder contained within. In a few short days they explode into blossoms, the full gamut of nature in their color; all the textures of a tailors shop in their blossoms paper - flouncy, silky, leathery, lacy. They project their scent out, triggering sweet images of nectar for the bees, and sweet images of romance for people...
Perhaps they are clipped and brought into the house. Perhaps they are sold in the market to someone whom may never have raised roses - never really seen the bush. Perhaps they are left on the bush to go their natural path.
And then, in a few more days, they are gone. The petals slowly fray from touch, or rust and wither, and fall to the ground - their bright colors fade to an earthy brown. The wondrous scent has faded into a vague shadow of it self. The remaining pollen floats away hopefully in a breeze, or suffers the same fate as the petals. Finally, all that is left is the stem, and the bush.
The bush, reaches deeper into the soil, stretches further into the air, gathering strength for it's next round of creation.
The Rose
To say "Rose", brings forth the image of the flower, opened in its full splendor, or a tight bud, barely breaking into bloom; fragrant essence wafting in the breeze, its stamen dotted with pollen, its stem armored with tines.
But the flower could not be without the bush, almost forgotten in its stoic functionality. The years of growing, pushing the roots into the earth to gather up the damp, the nutrient, spreading leaves into the sun to collect the dappled rays, vines going out and up, thorns to ward off those that would try their luck at a tasty leaf. If it were not for the flower, this bush would be a weed - pulled out and discarded, a bramble, a nuisance.
The flowers are the culmination of growth. The tiny buds so tightly wrapped that one could scarcely imagine the wonder contained within. In a few short days they explode into blossoms, the full gamut of nature in their color; all the textures of a tailors shop in their blossoms paper - flouncy, silky, leathery, lacy. They project their scent out, triggering sweet images of nectar for the bees, and sweet images of romance for people...
Perhaps they are clipped and brought into the house. Perhaps they are sold in the market to someone whom may never have raised roses - never really seen the bush. Perhaps they are left on the bush to go their natural path.
And then, in a few more days, they are gone. The petals slowly fray from touch, or rust and wither, and fall to the ground - their bright colors fade to an earthy brown. The wondrous scent has faded into a vague shadow of it self. The remaining pollen floats away hopefully in a breeze, or suffers the same fate as the petals. Finally, all that is left is the stem, and the bush.
The bush, reaches deeper into the soil, stretches further into the air, gathering strength for it's next round of creation.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Mythical Critters – the Dryad
We have all heard of pieces parts of olde wisdom based on
irrational systems of divination.
Examples include astrology, runes, tarot, the elements, fortune cookies,
etc. All of these, and many other
systems, were attempts to explain complicated things, with a simple set of
rules. Though modern science mostly
dismisses them as tom-foolery (poor tom always gets the short end of the
stick), many of us have felt in their prophetic words, little bits of truth
from time to time that seem more than just a statistical game.
Astrology is a great example – though science can easily prove
that the doctor delivering the baby exerted a larger gravity or other effect
than the other planets did, there are pieces to astrology that sometimes
provide a template of understanding. Consider for a moment the origins of
astrology though – that it was passed down from tribal elder to tribal elder
for hundreds of generations – that during that time, these same elders knew
when a child was born, observed them over the years, and perhaps from this
data, they were able to come up with some generalizations that they passed down
as well. Over thousands of years, and
tens of thousands of children, a statistical database unfolds, which though
perhaps the “true” source of the differences is hidden still, there is some
interesting generalization which we can at least look at with a cautious eye
about the “Leo’s” and “Taurus’s” of this world
So, continuing with the theme of mythical archetypes, is the
lovely Dryad. I know a few folks that
looking into them, the Dryad vision “sprouts” up – treelike, with deep roots,
supportive and loving, with a curious mix of social in small groups, and a
desire for time almost alone. They
typically don’t like large groups.
With Dryads, the “elemental forms” are important. They need water, and the flow that provides,
but not too much or they wash away or rot.
They are rooted in earth – stability, grounded, solid. If the ground is
too hard – as with the seed tossed in the crack of a rock, over the years, they
can crack even a giant bolder under the pressure of their roots and the
environment. They are wood of nature,
dynamic, creative, deeply living and feeling.
They can be a bit ponderous and set, but are able to bend without
breaking, within limits. They often have
a tenuous relationship with metal and fire – both respecting and working with
it, but also being leery of it, recognizing both the importance of having a
place to grow, and respecting the danger that these elements (and technology in
general) represent in terms of loss of social connection, personal value, and stability.
They often have some scars from metal or fire.
Their relationship with air is also complicated – they love the thunder,
even though it is dangerous (fire), they love the power behind the wind, but
don’t like to always feel it.
The Mythical Critters of everyday life
Over the last couple of years, I've come up with the theory that
many of the historically common archetypes of mythical creatures, are based on
personalities, and constitutions of people that we find around us in our lives
here. We talk about someone being “elf
like”, or “dwarf” or “fairy”, but upon closer examination, these labels can
really go so deeply into the parallels that we draw between daily life and the
mythical world in the background, that we can gain some insight from them.
Barbara and I have done so much contemplation on this, that
we wonder if there might not be a therapeutic model in correlating ones-self
with a mythical archetype, just as there are so many other archetypes which can
help people to understand or justify at least some portion of their nature.
On contemplation, we realize that the basic archetype can be
limiting though. Take for example the “fairy”
– a tiny winged creature with magical powers.
First off, if we look “within” to try to intuit truth to a thing that we
can’t really “know”, asking the question “is that all that a fairy is”, at
least for me, results in a resounding “NO!”.
It appears, for instance, that fairies are often creatures that desire
community, but for whatever reason often live a more singular life. They often have little sense of time, or at
least, little appreciation for its linearity. They often have a quality which
may appear to be “entitled” – as if they deserve a comfy existence, just from
their being. Also, often, they feel like they should be able to make things
happen here more easily – that they shouldn’t have to “push” or “try” as hard
as they do to affect a positive outcome.
This leads to a categorization as being a “dreamer” – but what if their
nature is simply different… What if they are from a space where , in fact, life
was “easier” – that manifestation was how things worked, you got stuff done by wishing
for it to be done. Imagine a world with relatively
few beings, homogeneous in nature, no perdition, little competition for resource.
It is a world of collective cooperation and planning – where every birth, every
major decision is planned by the collective group, for the benefit of the
all. Food falls as dew drops – like manna
from heaven. Seasons are light, so the
passing of time is marked more as a story, reenacted over the millennia, than
as a warning for “cold times ahead”.
Thinking more about the fairies, it seems like there are
different folks, different “clans” of the fairy folks. The air fairies, of
above, are the most common example. But, perhaps mermaids are just “water
fairies” – similar in so many other ways.
It turns out that there are not only salt water mermaids of the open
seas, but also fresh water mermaids – bound to interface between the sea and
the land. I’ve come to realize that for
whatever reason, I attract and love fairies – even though I’m not one myself.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
On Education
I had a great conversation today with a local Tech Guru and Educator, Ken Arnold, talking about education, society, budgets, long term planning, and students. So many things that are broken in the educational system, and at the same time, so many things that we could really do to quite literally change the world for the better right now.
In driving back, I did some thinking and came up with a thought: Educational Institutions - weather public schools, private universities, technical institutes or community colleges should all be graded on the return of investment that their pupils experience that is due to the education that institution provided them.
This needs to be systemic - colleges that are promoting a degree in a field that is already flooded, and so jobs are either not available locally, or the wage has been driven down to an unworkable level, have failed in their duty to provide a return on the students investment. Even if they have educated the pupil, they have failed in the higher goal of promoting their students to a better position in life, a return on the investment of money, time, and opportunity that the students have (and in many cases, will continue to) paid.
Any educational institution that measures its success by its investors return on investment, instead of its students return on investment is totally missing the mark, and I would argue is only being a leach on society.
In driving back, I did some thinking and came up with a thought: Educational Institutions - weather public schools, private universities, technical institutes or community colleges should all be graded on the return of investment that their pupils experience that is due to the education that institution provided them.
This needs to be systemic - colleges that are promoting a degree in a field that is already flooded, and so jobs are either not available locally, or the wage has been driven down to an unworkable level, have failed in their duty to provide a return on the students investment. Even if they have educated the pupil, they have failed in the higher goal of promoting their students to a better position in life, a return on the investment of money, time, and opportunity that the students have (and in many cases, will continue to) paid.
Any educational institution that measures its success by its investors return on investment, instead of its students return on investment is totally missing the mark, and I would argue is only being a leach on society.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Technology, Compression and Life...
Being an engineer, and having been a metal-smith (which were one of the earliest adopters of technology and tools), I work with technology and tools a lot. Recently contemplating on the nature of stuff, it occurred to me that almost all of technology, almost all tools, are means of "compressing" some aspect of life - increasing their "density", or "value".
Tools "compress" effort, and allow you to do more work in a unit of time. The multiply or "compress" force to give mechanical advantage, or shear or otherwise push a lot of work into a small "thing".
Agriculture is about compressing the amount of food into an area of land. That couple handful of berries from a random wild bush is compressed a thousand fold in a modern farm, with bush after bush of plants bread for volume (some times at the expense of taste).
Transferring power "compresses energy" so that you can transport it - so that the spinning 100 ton rotor of a power plant can provide a tiny amount of its energy to spin up the motor on your house vac.
Information is all about compression. Taking vague concepts and reducing them symbolically into utterances we call words, which we break down and spell with letters, which we can encode with ones and zeros which we can further reduce by coding statistics (replacing a common word with a shorter code).
Even the media of the information continues to be compressed - to increase in density. My first Hard Drive could store 5MB - 5 million characters of information. A typical typed page is about four thousand characters - so it could hold over a thousand pages of text! It was a monster weighing close to 50 lbs, and being physically larger than my computer. Now days, you can buy a micro SD card, smaller than your thumb nail which has 64GB of data - more than 12,000 time the capacity, on something about 1/12,000 the size...
But at the same time, I think more and more people are realizing that "it" isn't just about the compression any more. Instead of food per unit acre, people are realizing that there are other metrics - the taste of something grown and prepared with love and intention. That instead of using a power sander which could do the job in a few moments, that using a piece of sand paper allows you to feel the thing you're working on - to have a relationship with it. That even in the world of PDFs and download books, that there is a certain pleasure in touching the pages, of flipping them - of seeing the dog eared pages, and signs that someone else has appreciated this book - shared in it's pleasure.
Perhaps the Luddites were on to something after all...
Tools "compress" effort, and allow you to do more work in a unit of time. The multiply or "compress" force to give mechanical advantage, or shear or otherwise push a lot of work into a small "thing".
Agriculture is about compressing the amount of food into an area of land. That couple handful of berries from a random wild bush is compressed a thousand fold in a modern farm, with bush after bush of plants bread for volume (some times at the expense of taste).
Transferring power "compresses energy" so that you can transport it - so that the spinning 100 ton rotor of a power plant can provide a tiny amount of its energy to spin up the motor on your house vac.
Information is all about compression. Taking vague concepts and reducing them symbolically into utterances we call words, which we break down and spell with letters, which we can encode with ones and zeros which we can further reduce by coding statistics (replacing a common word with a shorter code).
Even the media of the information continues to be compressed - to increase in density. My first Hard Drive could store 5MB - 5 million characters of information. A typical typed page is about four thousand characters - so it could hold over a thousand pages of text! It was a monster weighing close to 50 lbs, and being physically larger than my computer. Now days, you can buy a micro SD card, smaller than your thumb nail which has 64GB of data - more than 12,000 time the capacity, on something about 1/12,000 the size...
But at the same time, I think more and more people are realizing that "it" isn't just about the compression any more. Instead of food per unit acre, people are realizing that there are other metrics - the taste of something grown and prepared with love and intention. That instead of using a power sander which could do the job in a few moments, that using a piece of sand paper allows you to feel the thing you're working on - to have a relationship with it. That even in the world of PDFs and download books, that there is a certain pleasure in touching the pages, of flipping them - of seeing the dog eared pages, and signs that someone else has appreciated this book - shared in it's pleasure.
Perhaps the Luddites were on to something after all...
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