[ExI] And Meta You Know

[hkhenson]

At 10:42 AM 1/23/2008, PJ wrote:
>On Jan 23, 2008 7:26 AM, hkhenson <hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote:
> > Now Meta mode.  Why do these things infest speech?

snip

>Keith nailed it.  I never heard of BSC before, but all you need to
>know is the following: we unconsciously and consciously copy each
>other.  Someone starts a behavior, we see something to admire in them
>and we copy it.  Or we don't see something we admire and we still copy
>it, because all we really desperately want is to fit in.  Everything,
>especially our place in the tribe/pack/clan, is learned by mimicry.
>Don't fit in > don't survive.

This is most apparent with children.  The most sensible and in depth 
work on this subject is "The Nurture Assumption" by Judith 
Harris.  If you have not read this, do so.  It is a first class work 
in applied evolutionary psychology.  (Pinker recommends it, in fact 
he had a lot to do with it being written.)

>If you observe teenagers, you know the bar is only set as high as it
>takes to not be completely ostracized.  That's not too high.  :)
>
>Think of the "You Knows" and "Ums" (my big problem, because I AM
>always looking for the right word and of which I am trying to cure
>myself!) and their ilk as the connective tissue of speech.

What *is* speech and how is it generated?  For that matter, what is 
thought and how is thought generated?  William Calvin book, The 
Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind, invokes 
evolution on a time scale of milliseconds as we evolve noise through 
a number of grammar and meaning selection cycles into speech. (I may 
be confusing one of his other books here.)  An evolutionary model of 
this kind is strongly supported by the kinds of errors we make in speech.

It's a hell of a computationally demanding task!

>In fact,
>think of writing a speech to deliver to a large group.  If you typed
>up a persuasive essay in proper, grammatical English, and then just
>read it aloud, you'd sound like a dweeb AND you would lose your
>audience.  But if you add the occasional transitional and connective
>words/phrases that mimic regular speech patterns, then your speech can
>come alive, feel extemporaneous and "real" to the human ear and
>therefore, brain.

There *are* people who can write and others who can read it off the 
TelePrompTer and make it sound good.

snip

>To those annoyed by this aspect of human behavior: Do you really think
>you have the fortitude and consciousness to simultaneously live within
>a functioning society and behaviorally exist completely outside its
>loop, and at the same time possess that extra "something" that allows
>your oral communication to sing?
>
>Fuggetaboutit!

There is another aspect I used to call intellectual impedance 
matching.  You can't communicate ideas (memes) well without having a 
vast amount of information in common between the speaker and listener.

Think of the efforts we go to trying to educate the young.

Keith