Reinforcement

[peterbirks]

I think that we spend much of our lives in search of validation. It's a lot easier to find people who have the same twisted view of reality and to subsume yourself into that group, thus feeling more "normal", than it is to head out into the real world ad to face up to the fact that, when you come down to it, your own view of reality is seriously messed up.

Drinkers do it all the time. When drinking you avoid social circles including non-drinking people. Indeed, to you, the drinker, it is these people who seem weird. Instead you either seek out other drinkers or, more seriously, you avoid everyone. If you are outside in a major conurbation one sunny afternoon and you see half a dozen "dossers" sitting on a couple of park benches, drinking Diamond White, just consider the fact that they might see us as the weird ones. They reinforce their own view of the world.

Poker players are the same. One of the hazards of leaving the world of full-time employment and entering the land of professional poker playing is that you are cutting yourself just that little bit further off from people who challenge your own validation.

All of this is understandable. Which would you prefer, a feeling of "being normal" amongst others of a similar ilk, or a feeling of horrific alienation? The former, obviously. However, the downside of this comes when you see a group of, say, computer geek male adolescent student types in a pub (or any other group of which you aren't a member) and you look at them.

Women on 'intelligent' radio shows, for reasons which somehow escape me, often mock these little self-contained groups of the socially asymetric, without (or so it appears to me) asking themselves the rather simple question of why things get that way.

My own views on life are continually being challenged when I leave the house and come to the office, and the alienation can be bad. But I think that this is better than seeking out those who see things the same way as I do. That's what I did when I was drinking.

I guess that wives, or partners, are good at "dragging you back into the real world", but for the singles amongst us, that kind of control doesn't exist. It's eminently easy to drift further and further into smaller and smaller groups of like-minded people, until you end up being an 18xx fanatic, or trainspotting, or only ever talking about poker.

++++++++++

A group of 22 people have been arrested in Hong Kong for an insurance scam with a difference. In these cases they actually did destroy the sight of one eye in the "victims". Apparently four people from rural China accepted an offer of about US$35,000 to have the sight of one of their eyes taken away. As the investigator observed, that kind of money can buy 10 houses in rural Guangdong.

Which all brings us back to relative values, doesn't it? Is the sight of an eye worth $35,000? Well, no, probably not to anyone in the west. But suppose you were living in London, didn't have a job, and someone offered you 10 houses in return for the sight of an eye? Hmm. I can see that this might be a tougher choice if offered to some people.

________________________

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Could you elaborate on this:

"Women on 'intelligent' radio shows, for reasons which somehow escape me, often mock these little self-contained groups of the socially asymetric, without (or so it appears to me) asking themselves the rather simple question of why things get that way."

Who are these women?

and how do things get this way?

DY

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Well yes. You don't want to turn into Oakes, do you? Although his restricted set of interests does mutate over time, so he gets to drift from small group to small group, which is social evolution of some sort.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Well, I often listen to Radio Four either late at night or in mid-afternoon. Or, sometimes it's Radio Five.

Frequently there will be a collection of "talking heads" on some topic or another (for some reason, the topic doesn't seem that important), and with remarkable frequency (or what seems like remarkable frequency -- I'll admit that statistically I'm being a bit wooly here) I'll hear a comment from some 30-something to 40-something woman about "boys with toys" or "computer geeks with no social skills" or some such. Indeed, a few weeks ago I recall one woman calling such an attitude "borderline autistic", which would seem to indicate either a very broad range of the definition of autism (almost to the level where it might be considered the preferred way to be) or blunt stupidity.

What I find just mildly irritating about this is that these groups are seen as some kind of figure of fun, to be easily mocked. In other words, the categorisation betrays in the speaker a lack of intellectual curiosity and, by extension, a not very high level of intelligence.

PJ

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Now as to the "how do things get this way?". Well, let's elaborate a left-field theory.

Women are hard-wired to find mates who are not of the same gene pool. It's one of the reasons they are not (as a rule) sexually attracted to their close siblings. It therefore makes sense for women to construct a society where lots of different gene pools intermingle.

For men, however, the unknown is dangerous territory. You seek it out if you have to (for example, if that is the only way to find a mate, or to find food), but, as a rule, you know what you like and you like what you know. So you used to have regular pubs, where you met the same people and, quite often, discussed the same things. This kind of certainty is comforting.

But, to the female, this just looks weird. When it gets taken to the extent of constructing your own social rules that separate your group from society as a whole, that, by definition, exclude rather than include, then this hits the hard-wiring of women as something that could serve to destroy the human race.

So, on the one hand, we seek validation, because that is comforting. On the other, pulling us in the opposite direction, we must seek the unknown, or our society will succumb to too much interbreeding.

There are mathematical models (I think) to express how much intermingling you need to ensure diversity and survival. However, even the most mathematically challenged could spot that a "society" consisting of just six males is unlikely to be top-notch when it comes to genetic superiority.

As such, these kind of groups strike at the deepest parts of female hard-wiring. For males, they only impact the hard-wiring when he starts thinking that it's about time he "settled down". At this point, you may notice, they tend to drift away from such social groups and become what their former friends call "a different person now he's married". They often attribute the cause of this to the female, but that isn't the reason. It's just that the male's view of societal constructs has changed when it comes to continuing the human race. Suddenly, larger societies (or, as we see it, "society as a whole") is good, whereas smaller cliques, linked by the subconscious to interbreeding, are bad.

Feel free to shoot down in flames. I'm not sure that I agree with more than 50% of it myself.

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

I'm really not sure about all this. After all games-playing is a sub-culture which does invite abuse and includes some people who are socially inadequate because of their relentless and tunnel-visioned enthusiasm for games. But there are some people who were socially inadequate first - before they got into the comforting territory of games nutters, for whom the hobby they pursue merely reinforces what was already there.

I often feel a need to disassociate myself from the 18xx lunatics and those who play relentless 17-hour games based on Belgium in the middle ages. I like to play games for reasons of sociability, but I'm not like THEM. It isn't too far from the fringes of the games hobby to the darker woods of Sealed Knot re-creation societies.

But deep down I have feelings of admiration for enthusiastic nutters, almost regardless of how deranged I might think their hobby is. So I'm hugely impressed by the people you find on the banks of River Trent at 6.30am on a Saturday morning with umpteen bits of fishing tackle. I want people to care about stuff, to be arsed about something and if that's what floats their float then good luck to you. Besides which I'm out at that time in the morning on a bike ride so I'm a bit glass-housed anyway.

Speaking personally I like not getting reinforcement. I like to be the weirdo in the group, the atheist amongst the Christians, the accountant in the shorts. So I don't think it's a universal truth you're getting to here. I like being challenged and I empathise with what Matthew Creese said to his Dad not long back when they were buying books in the trendy-left section of Waterstones - namely that he should be buying neo-con tracts so as to challenge his way of thinking, not just buying books by people he agreed with.

I'm not sure I even agree that it's a male/female thing. I think it's driven by societal roles. A lot of what you're talking about relates to lesiure activities and men simply have more leisure time than women. I think the chat-show people are presumably the likes of Fi Glover and her R5 descendant trying really hard to copy the style, Anita Anand, who do take a dim view of some of the activities of males, but I find it hard not to agree with them most of the time.

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

...the hobby they pursue merely reinforces what was already there.

The grey tee-shirts whose original colour may have been black or white (flip a coin) are another dead giveaway.

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

"borderline autistic"

There are a range of conditions between "normal" and full-blown autism. Asperger's syndrome is one, semantic-pragmatic disorder another. Not autism, to be sure, but milder and simpler forms of an incapacity in the dealing-with-people-and-situations field. Even autism has degrees of severity. On a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is full-blown padded cell total non-communicatigve autism and 0 is "normal" (hah), Asperger's probably scores about 20 and S-P about 10. All approximate, but we did some research when Johnny was diagnosed as possible semantic-pragmatic. It's looking less likely now, which is good, although the condition can be dealt with. Now it just looks like he's determined to make sense of things his own way which, while likely to make for difficulties, I find rather admirable.

Mike

Out in the cold

[(Anonymous)]

This is an interesting topic, but it takes me a different way, because I've never managed to find the congregation of the like-minded, so I'm stuck with my own company.

I'm happy to label myself a libertarian; but libertarians are few on the ground and not to be found just by going to the nearest pub. Furthermore, although I don't remember ever actually meeting another one in person, I suspect that the few that exist probably disagree with each other quite a lot.

On another level, I like short strategy games that simulate reality in some way. I don't take to poker, because it doesn't simulate reality at all. In the 1960s, I was happy to discover Avalon Hill board games. But the games got longer, and went on getting longer and longer, until I don't know how people find the time to play them any more. A game should be a brief, pleasant diversion from real life. Half an hour, maybe two hours at the most.

Why is humanity composed of statists who love playing dreary interminable games? I don't know; I just know that I don't find any crowd of like-minded people to be a part of. It's not an option.

-- Jonathan

Re: Out in the cold

[(Anonymous)]

I have worked in the learning disabilities field for nearly 30 years and I still remember the opening gambit of one of the course leaders on an Autistic Spectrum Disorders course many years ago. She said "Autism is just a very severe form of maleness". It is certainly a statement which can be defended (of the many ASD kids I have worked with, I doubt if as many as 1 in 20 were female).

There is little doubt that most of us games players have tendencies in this direction if we are not careful. I recall going into a major chess congress with my wife once and her first comment was "Christ, what a collection of geeks and wierdos". I couldn't argue!!

Brian Frew

Re: Out in the cold

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

The thing is: Can "a very severe form of maleness" be defined as "ill"?

Philosophically I feel that we are in very dangerous territory here. I looked up semantic-pragmatism, since I hadn't heard of it before. One line that struck me was:

For example, they usually have difficulty understanding social situations and expectations, they like to stick fairly rigidly to routines, and they lack imaginative play.

These are also defined as "mild autistic features". But it's a bit of a problem, because you could equally describe this as "not fitting in". And when you move towards calling "not fitting in", or finding it difficult to cope with societal norms, as an illness, then you are little different from the psychologists in Soviet Russia.

With semantic-pragmatism I see even greater difficulties, since it appears to describe "problems understanding the meaning of what other people say, and they do not understand how to use speech appropriately themselves."

Note the word "appropriately".

The trouble is, language is a rather artificial construct. If a child "learns to talk by memorising phrases, instead of putting words together freely and confuses "I" and "you", and tends to "repeat phrases out of context, especially snippets remembered from television programmes" then I at least can understand what might be going on in their heads, and it's nothing to do with illness. Anyone who has studied semiotics can see what might be happening here.

I think that one of the most telling paragraphs that I found (this is from the National Autistic Society, by the way) was this:

There is another aspect to the issue of labelling which is altogether more emotive. Many parents feel much more able to cope with the idea of their child having semantic pragmatic language disorder than with the idea of their child being a high functioning autistic. But many other parents find the label semantic pragmatic disorder frustrating and baffling, as they only begin to really understand their child's behaviour when they realise he or she has a form of autism.

We know that the medical world, like the IT world, love the "men in white coats" syndrome, whereby we ordinary folk are not meant to raise the possibility that they are really floundering around in the dark.

Mike raised this point that you could measure autism on a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 was "normal". Where you actually draw the line between "normal" and "not normal" is presumably not at "1", or even at "5". But that line is drawn somewhere. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that the definition of "sick" is significantly more subjective than we like to admit, and much of that definition sits with how comfortable we (the vast majority) are with a minority who do not think the same way that we do.

PJ

Re: We the vast majority

[(Anonymous)]

"... how comfortable we (the vast majority) are with a minority who do not think the same way that we do."

Goodness gracious, I have yet to find anyone who thinks the same way that I do. Have you really found not just one, but more than one person who thinks the same way that you do? Remarkable. You might consider dressing identically and appearing on television together. The Triple-Pete Show.

(I'm not trying to be funny at your expense; just innocently following a train of thought in my own peculiar way. I don't suppose anyone else would have followed it in that particular direction...)

When I was young, my mother worried that I might be autistic, because I was rather uncommunicative and tended to live in a world of my own. But so far I've survived without treatment.

-- Jonathan

Re: We the vast majority

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I think you are confusing process with outcome, Jonathan. In the broad scheme of things, I think that I think in the same way as quite a significant minority of people. I might not come to the same conclusions, but we think in the same way.

Let's put it this way. It would be impossible for us to have a reasoned argument if we did not think in the same way. Now, there are a large number of people in the world at whom I throw up my hands in despair and realize that we are never going to come to any kind of conclusion, because our starting precepts are so different.

There are other people in the world where the argument doesn't even get that far. For example, people who live "immediately in the present".

However, there are enough people (for me and for you), who think in a sufficiently similar way to make conversation possible.

PJ

Re: We the vast majority

[(Anonymous)]

"It would be impossible for us to have a reasoned argument if we did not think in the same way."

Sure. That's why it's impossible to complete a reasoned argument with anyone. It's possible to start one, and to continue one for some time, but it's not possible to finish one. I've taken part in a lot of arguments over the years, and watched arguments going on in which I wasn't involved; and I've never known anyone succeed in persuading anyone else of anything significant by means of argument. People are not only obstinate, they're all mentally incompatible with each other.

Furthermore, human communication isn't up to the task. I find after a while that, although I'm arguing in favour of A, the other person thinks I'm arguing in favour of B -- which incidentally goes some way to explain why his counter-arguments seem so ridiculous. But he goes on thinking I'm in favour of B and there's nothing I can do to change his mind.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that argument is largely a waste of time. Worth doing only for entertainment, or to clarify your own thoughts by expressing yourself. As a way of persuading other people or being persuaded by them, it's a dead duck.

But, of course, it would be very silly of me to expect to persuade you of this!!

Conversation is possible, as long as you don't expect too much of it.

A book is a monologue and you'd expect it to be less persuasive than a dialogue. Oddly, I find the reverse applies: books are more persuasive than any kind of dialogue. I've occasionally changed my mind in significant ways after reading books. Perhaps because the communication is more carefully done and therefore more successful. A book may have been laboured over for months or years.

-- Jonathan

Re: We the vast majority

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

You seem to be taking an "all or nothing" approach to argument. While it may not be possible to get a counterparty in a discussion to suddenly say "oh yes, I see. You are absolutely right", it is certainly possible for two people to shift their ground (or, shall we say "world view") at least a little. I'm sure that you have had your attitudes changed slightly, ever-so-slightly, as a result of discussions. I know that mine have been altered, sometimes significantly.

Of course, as you say, people are obstinate. This means that even if the person will not admit it in the conversation your argument may have had an effect. This is one of the major arguments in favour of not telling people things that they do not want to hear when you are discussing poker. You lose on two counts. First, they walk away with some very useful information that will make them a better player. And second, they will never thank you for it. I find it much easier these days to reinforce people's self-belief systems than to tell them that, basically, they are talking total bollocks.

But where there is no cash at stake, I'll happily attempt to get people to see things in a slightly different way. This might not alter the conclusion that they come to, but if you present different factors in the argument, and if that person is capable of importing those factors into his or her thought processes (and, remember, a larege number of people are not capable of this), then you may gently cause that person to develop a slightly different conclusion. Even if that view is only slightly a bit more of "on the other hand...".

PJ

Re: We the vast majority

[(Anonymous)]

Excuse me a moment while I rewind this discussion a short distance.

"Mike raised this point that you could measure autism on a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 was 'normal'. Where you actually draw the line between 'normal' and 'not normal' is presumably not at '1', or even at '5'. But that line is drawn somewhere. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that the definition of 'sick' is significantly more subjective than we like to admit, and much of that definition sits with how comfortable we (the vast majority) are with a minority who do not think the same way that we do."

I think what I've been trying to say is that I completely agree with Mike's point, but that your final words above don't seem consistent with it. He's saying that there is no real dividing line, just a spectrum from one end to the other; but you seem to be thinking in terms of a dividing line with a 'vast majority' on one side and a small minority stuck on the other side.

As I see it, all humans are crazy, though some are crazier than others. And they're all crazy in different ways. To define one group of people as sane and another group as crazy means drawing a pretty arbitrary line; though there may be some sense in trying to distinguish between people who are relatively harmless and people who are dangerous to others.

-- Jonathan

Re: We the vast majority

[(Anonymous)]

Having been diagnosed as having Aspergers Syndrome things are a little clearer to me. I'm different but then we all are. I know my limits and create a world around me in which I can function.

We all have to belong to some tribe or other. In the past, it was where you were born. Unless you became an outcast, of course.

Transport, mass communication (the Internet in particular) and the complexities of modern lives allow you to pick and chose your tribe. You can even pick a tribe that suits a particular facet of your life or join two or more tribes to suit a collection of your traits.

Being a drunk amongst other drunks is just belonging to a tribe. Whether that tribe survives or not is another thing altogether. But humans are social animals so joinging a tribe is a must. If they destroy themselves in the process of their "socialising" then that is just Darwinism at its finest.

JayBee across the Sea.