[ExI] Limits of human modification

Fri Nov 27 02:15:31 UTC 2015

Tar wrote:  One thing you can say for postmodernism, you don’t need math to
understand it. In fact, *you don’t really need to understand it. You just
need to be eloquent. *

----------------

That is as profound a statement as I've seen in quite some time.

Once we had Reading Through the Curriculum, Math Through the Curriculum,
Cognitive Skills Though the Curriculum and so on.  I was on a committee as
part of the last one.

I went to a convention on the subject in Chicago, came home and had to
present my findings to the committee.  I wrote a paper that limned what I
heard there - lots of BS, mostly big words like semiotics and the usual
catchphrases.  I made the mistake of telling another member about my satire.

After a page of my speech, during which all were attentive if not rapt, she
just burst out laughing and the hoax was over.

Naturally, most of them said that they knew what I was doing all along,
blah blah blah.  Horsefeathers.  They ate it up.  All you have to be, says
Tara, is eloquent, and she is right.  Making sense is optional.  Being
impressive wins the day.

How many of us, when what we read or hear is confusing, blame ourselves
rather than the writer or speaker?  I'd say probably most of us, at least
at times.  Time to rethink that. We are all pretty smart here.  If we don't
understand it, maybe it's not making a lot of sense.  (Take that, DeLillo
and Pynchon.)

Just as in the visual arts, it's what the artist says about the work that
sways critics, not the image so much.  In an entirely different context,
this is what makes for great salespeople (just add the right clothes and
body language and facial expressions.  If you study persuasion, as I do,
these are great models of it.)  As a professor my attitude was :  this is a
performance, it's selling psychology - it's Showtime!

As for postmodernism, that was my problem - I was trying to understand it.
Take away the smoke and mirrors and there's nothing there.  The
existentialists strike me much the same way.  Literary theories that I have
read are laughable.

For Tara:  there is a difference between emotional and social
intelligence.  One would think that if one had the former, then one would
not make big social blunders, as one could anticipate the emotional
reactions of others.   Not always true.  I have a lot of the former, 99%ile
actually (visual test reading emotions on faces), but not a lot of the
latter.  I speak frankly and honestly and only later learn that people were
offended.  This is typical among people high in math and music, like a
borderline Asperger's.

As for soft science, experimental psychology is fairly hard science at
times.  Clinical is not and never has been and ought to avoid using
statistics in any form.  I know.  I was trained in it, and I did it in
several mental hospitals, and I left it in disgust.  (FYI - the burnout
rate in clinical and in psychiatry in mental hospitals is very high).

Bill W

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

> There are so many forms of creativity, not just in the fine arts, I
> certainly don’t claim all of them require emotional intelligence. But
> storytelling, especially “character based fiction,” involves placing
> yourself into other minds and imagining not just “What would I do if X
> happened?” but also “How would I feel if X happened …and why?”
>
> Re: Academia. There was an attempt, in my field, History, to import the
> tools of the harder social sciences, like statistics. This attempt withered
> in the desert of math skills of those in the field. After all, if those of
> us in the liberal arts understood math, we’d go get real jobs (and higher
> incomes) in the first place. I don’t think it’s at all a coincidence that
> right after the attempt to make the soft sciences “harder” failed, the
> postmodernists took over. One thing you can say for postmodernism, you
> don’t need math to understand it. In fact, you don’t really need to
> understand it. You just need to be eloquent.
>
> Which brings me to a related capacity (disease?) that is almost certainly
> genetic: hypergraphia. The love or even obsession with words.
>
> Hypothesis: If hypergraphia and religious tendencies are linked (some
> preliminary studies on the brain suggest this) it would explain why all the
> earliest books in the world were written by religious freaks! Maybe there
> was just as high a proportion of skeptics in ancient times after all, but
> it’s only recently that they’ve learned to defend themselves in writing!
> (Read The Worms and the Cheese, the records of an ordinary fellow being
> tortured by the Inquisition because of his absolutely prosaic account of
> creation arising through natural processes, like coagulating cheese.)
>
> After all, it wasn’t just in Europe that writing was mostly the task of
> clergy. Sanskrit in India was created by holy men to write holy texts, the
> Buddhists and Taoists in China and Japan wrote many of the earliest books,
> in the Middle East, Arabic literacy spread with the Qu’ran. Missionaries
> were among the first makers of dictionaries and learned thousands of rare
> languages in order to translate the bible and convert tribes, in fact,
> often even inventing alphabets for them. Coincidence, or do religious
> people really, really love words?!
>
> Religious people have also burned a lot of books, but then many a writer
> would burn their competition if they could get away with it….
>
> Re: clergy. It’s possible that the percent of clergy among my ancestors
> was perfectly normal and it just seems high to me because I can’t figure
> out why anyone would need so many of that vocation! Did one out of every
> three male British children really enter the clergy, or was that just in
> the upper class?
>
> My ancestors were thoroughly middle class, right back to the earliest know
> bearers of the patronym. One of them did acquire a knightly coat of arms,
> but it turns out he was a rich clerk who just bought it. (Which was illegal
> but common.) Then they became Puritans and sailed to America and the whole
> branch had ten kids each for the next three hundred years, and I swear, the
> number of them that became ministers was ludicrous. To me. But a few went
> to Boston and became Transcendentalists  and Poets after the Revolution,
> and later in the 19th century, writers of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, while
> those in the south and the midwest still reared up Ministers (and also
> didn’t seem to mind slavery). And then into the early twentieth century
> that northern branch and western branch produced a lot of playwrights,
> poets, failed novelists (I didn’t say they were *good* writers). The line
> in the south and midwest made more ministers. Lots and lots.
>
> But of course, this doesn’t prove anything. Even if one family tree were
> not just anecdotal, the individuals that stand out are bound to be those
> who acquired some sort of standing, whether in writing or a church. There
> were also plenty of cowboys and farmers in the midwest and furniture
> sellers and middle managers in the north and west. I haven’t done a
> statistical analysis. If I knew that much math, I’d have a real job!
>
> Oh, and the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series rocks!
>
> Tara Maya
> Blog <http://taramayastales.blogspot.com/>  |  Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/taramayastales>  |  Facebook
> <http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Unfinished-Song-Epic-Fantasy/310271375658211?ref=hl>  |
>  Amazon
> <http://www.amazon.com/Tara-Maya/e/B004HAI038/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1349796143&sr=8-2-ent>  |
>  Goodreads <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2951879.Tara_Maya>
>
>
>
> On Nov 24, 2015, at 10:17 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:17 AM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just
>> statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious.
>>
>> I would not eliminate religious feelings…IF, as I suspect, it is linked
>> to our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the
>> theory that autism is a kind of mindblindness.  A theory of mine (which may
>> be incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as
>> spirits or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind
>> inverse mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as
>> inanimate objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate
>> objects as if they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very
>> tendency.)
>>
>> But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related
>> to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a
>> like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should
>> hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I
>> think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence.
>>
>> Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high
>> percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them
>> had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn’t killed because he
>> put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy… but more fiction
>> writers.
>>
>> Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other
>> mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I’m not
>> really sure that’s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I’ve noticed
>> that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very
>> “mind sighted” also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the
>> most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common
>> with them. Odd! But maybe it’s just because people who are very story-wise
>> are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without
>> losing the other, that would be my preference.
>>
>> Tara Maya
>>
>
> That's very interesting.  I have never heard creativity and emotional
> intelligence conflated. I tend to disagree with it, but then our
> understanding of creativity (C) is very poor.  In a general way, we can say
> that C is something people like or find useful, but in certain fields, like
> classical music or the visual arts, there is tremendous disagreement on C.
>
> What do you think of Alexander McCall Smith?  He surely can spin stories,
> but I'll bet the literati hold their noses when he is mentioned.
>
> I do hope that we can eliminate our race's tendency to worship things like
> trees or ancestors or farm animals.  That may be different from
> superstition.  I suspect we will need a few hundred years of research to
> tease these things out (once we have reached some agreed-upon definitions,
> which we certainly do not have now - and may never have if philosophers
> keep dithering).
>
> Those in academia who distrust science may be those who still believe in
> the blank slate and deny the role of genes (not just sociologists), like
> those who would deny the role of gender in the differences in math scores
> at the high end, despite the overwhelming evidence.  ("My theory is
> correct.  Never mind what the data say." - the tail wagging the dog).  I
> very much doubt that they deny findings in physics or chemistry.  They
> don't know enough to do that.  Of course they don't know enough psychology
> either.
>
> Re clergy:  the first son inherits.  The second and thereafter go into
> academia or the ministry, in British history and some others.
>
> bill w
>
> 
>
>
>> Blog <http://taramayastales.blogspot.com/>  |  Twitter
>> <https://twitter.com/taramayastales>  |  Facebook
>> <http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Unfinished-Song-Epic-Fantasy/310271375658211?ref=hl>  |
>>  Amazon
>> <http://www.amazon.com/Tara-Maya/e/B004HAI038/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1349796143&sr=8-2-ent>  |
>>  Goodreads <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2951879.Tara_Maya>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I assume that at some point in the future, every single human
>> characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes,
>> perhaps quite a few of them.
>>
>>
>> Yes to your question.  If they don't like immortality they have
>> options.  Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it
>> would be easier to live longer.
>>
>> Here's one for you all:  if you could eliminate religious feelings,
>> tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?
>>
>>
>>
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