Passionate Balance

Post-Mass-Marketing and the Metaphysics of Presence

2012-01-10T19:22:00.004-05:00

It's now cliche to assert that mass media business models are dead. It's no longer hard to either make or distribute media products. Markets are awash with digital product, which people expect for free. Artists today have to apply their creativity to other ways of producing unique value that people will buy.

At Sceneverse, where I work, we are becoming huge fans of the band One-Eyed Doll (Wikipedia), not just for their music, but for the whole way they create a scene around themselves that keeps them in touch with their fans and economically viable.

They sell what's rare.

For digital music files which have become hard to price, they sell album downloads on a pay-what-you-want basis. But if you buy an "appreciation package" involving a physical CD from them, you do so secure in the knowledge that each one is individually signed and bitten by the band's lead singer and guitarist, Kimberly Freeman. We bought some, and you can see the bite marks. They also sell buttons and baubles and stuff that fall off her costumes during their performances, (she is insanely energetic). They sell paintings of band members, thank-you notes handwritten by the duo, personalized thank-you videos, and other artisan products (understanding that these are FUN pomo-goth-slasher-freak-tregan-playing-hard-touring artisans). Items are priced by the degree of personalized attention the duo pour into them for the specific fan.

The bitten CDs and costume detritus put me in mind of Derrida (that's how much of a nerd I am). These are traces - marks of clawbacks - taking the product out of abstraction and connecting it to the material, physical person of the artist again. You could say it reminds us that artists are real people who need to survive, but it is too easy to be blithe about this market shift when you frame it that way. It's also a good example of Mike Masnick CwF + RtB = $$$ formula, but I want to resist formulation for a moment, to appreciate the deeper dynamics that make the formula work here.

In the value universe hypothesis proposed (and further developed) by economist and fellow Sceneversian Greg Rader, the bite marks on the CD "rehabilitate" it, in the following sense. A CD hovers perilously between economic quadrants in Rader's model.

- Is the CD a political-economy good? (A bearer of legally-enforceable intellectual property?)
- Is it a transactional/commodity good? (A "thing" you might find in a bin or rack for $10?)
- Is it an attention-economy good? (A heavily managed "star" product from a "fame" industry?)
- Is it a relational-economy good? (A way of personally thanking Kimberly and Junior for their art, and their dedication to making kick-buns experiences for us?)

The bite marks add flesh to how you consider this item. It's a trace of the non-metaphysical, which claws the product over much more in the direction of the relational economy than most CDs are - even autographed ones. (Music. Reloaded. This time, it's personal.) One-Eyed Doll are masterful relational marketers. Their offering actually covers all four Raderian value quadrants, but they strongly downplay their legal right to extract a price (obscure its legibility), and pump up the personal touch. They walk the incredibly delicate tightrope between offering relational, attentional and transactional goods with Venti integrity and a big invigorating shot of sheer camp.

Kimberly is certainly a persona. The real person that she is exceeds what we as remote fans can know about her, but she makes her presence known with a very physical trace of a moment - a moment when she considered us in particular, even if abstractly. The broken bits of her costumes are traces of the ferocity of her performances, of the activity pattern in life that she is. These traces themselves are not metaphysical. They are not pure hype or simply symbolic. Each one costs her some of her own life's focus.

One cannot escape metaphysics - these artists are replacing commodity fetishism (mass-producible, like the Coca-Cola brand marks) with relational fetishism. In (what might seem to be) less metaphysical terms, a materials engineer looking at the bite marks using an electron tunnelling microscope might just give a molecular description of the indentations in the material lattice of the substrate, and not care what made the marks. We imbue them with presence, with the subjectivity, agency, intention and affect of an author. We make them hosts in a communion with their source as we imagine her.

But that willingness to read presence into a trace (that if anything should alert us to absence and presence simultaneously) - that craving for presence that Derrida messes with and frustrates in his writings... that is a great marketing driver! If that hunger for presence drives all of Western civilization, and has since antiquity, that's a damn strong market trend to ride! It's a very smart way to start thinking about a business model.

One-Eyed Doll have their way of doing it, but other independent musicians are also - of sheer necessity - feeling their way around the new economics of culture, and doing more and more things to build up high-relational-value offerings that they can authentically and with integrity exchange in ways their fans are willing to pay for. This new music industry may not enjoy the same economies of scale that the old attentional economy of mass-market pop stars did, but it will be delightfully weird.

Integrity is key to this. This return of artisanal economics in the music industry is an example of the "new spirit of capitalism", where capitalism goes to the edge of the market, to things that exceed the rationalized production of industrialism, to mine authenticity and to return with products that bear its stamp. Not every indie rock group could offer the kind of value One-Eyed Doll does, and if they did, One-Eyed Doll would have to think of new stuff, to stand out from the crowd. One-Eyed Doll both is goth-y and makes fun of it, and they make fun of the vampire craze in pop culture. Bitten CDs take their meaning in the context of the whole conversational culture they create with their fans around that experiential stance.

Marketing in the way One-Eyed Doll does means cultivating weirdness, and being very clear about the weirdness you offer. That is the business you are in.

There is something you offer that your fans connect with. There is a distinctive communion, outside the easily-explained, outside the generic comparisons people may make between you and every other musical act out there. That is your product. It's probably something you can't quite put into words - something that may be the mojo in your music, or maybe the way you address the mix of dedicated fans and first-time listeners who turn up at your shows, the way you make great evening for them, or the comic perspective on the world you embody... maybe it is in the imaginary world or alternate reality your music creates for listeners who "get" your music... the kind of pain you give expression to for people, the masterful way you faithfully deliver on the awesomeness of a genre, the surprises and new sounds your technical skills let you produce... something that can't be churned out in a factory is the real thing you have to offer people.

If you connect your weird relational goods to that unique and authentic source of weird value, it is starting to look like you can build a business as a musician again. Communications technologies give you the relational reach to connect with your fans in these ways. In this new post-megastar economy, you may not be able to buy a castle in Scotland (at least not a big one in good repair). But you may actually be able to make your living managing your band, your brand, and your time, centered around the activity you most want to do.

There are definitely worse ways to spend your mortal moments.

PAEI, perceptions and self-similarity

2011-12-16T14:39:00.000-05:00

For anyone interested in the Adizes Methodology, I adapted this graphic from the Google Plus stream of Dorothy Shapland. It made me see a relationship between PAEI and perceptions. Really, it's an assertion that there may be a self-similarity in PAEI.

When you map PAE styles to the perceptions "is", "should" and "want", those things add up to "mine". But when you shift from the "me" to a "we" perspective, that perspective carves off a sense of what is, what is wanted, and what should be - in collective terms. It's about the state of the world for us.

My general observation is that this is another source of confusion in perceptions - in life and on management teams. Very, very, very often, people think they are arguing for the "we" case, but they misperceive. They fail to see that their perceptions are in fact very focused on their own understanding of "is", "should" and "want", then they falsely universalize these perceptions, and make pronouncements about what "we" must do.

An individual pronouncing for a "we" is usually projecting. The right to really make pronouncements about the reality we face, the goals we desire and the things we should do cannot be claimed by individuals unless they have been empowered by a group which has deliberated these things in an explicitly collective process.

Political debates in informal settings are typically duelling projections of the "me" as if it were "we", when it isn't.

However, there are all kinds of other ideas supported by this observation that perceptions may be "fractal" or self-similar. Perhaps I shall get into that in a later post.

Types of Costs

2011-05-18T23:12:00.000-04:00

(This is a total idea dump for my own future reference. I'm not sure if anyone else would get any mileage from it.)

Joel Dean was a pioneering figure in the field of managerial economics. His 1951 textbook of that title was important in establishing the field. One of the things he wrote there that still rivets my attention is the beginnings of something - the beginnings of a schema for understanding costs. Basically, he noted a whole series of what you might call "opponent" costs:

Opportunity costs - Outlay costs
Past costs - Future costs
Short run costs - Long run costs
Variable costs - Constant costs
Traceable costs - Common costs
Out of pocket costs - Book costs
Incremental costs - Sunk costs
Escapable costs - Unavoidable costs
Controllable costs - Non-controllable costs
Replacement costs - Historical costs

This strikes me as one very, very important and promising unfinished idea. I see the shadow of a future theory of costs in this initial collection of observations. It makes me want to continue the list. Going to Wikipedia for cost concepts offers the following additional ideas:

Private (internal, transactional) costs - external costs (externalities)
Social costs (internal and external costs) - Psychic costs (stress, worry, anxiety, uncertainty, fear - adding "repugnancy" costs in this category? e.g. the repugnancy of a market for human kidneys)

In business, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something, and hence is not available for use anymore. In economics, a cost is an alternative that is given up as a result of a decision.

The page then notes that cost of a business input ("intermediate consumption" in national accounting for GDP) includes its production costs, plus the markup for the producer's profit, plus transaction costs. Also mentioned are a couple of dimensions along which costs might be categorized:

Costs are often further described based on their timing or their applicability.

It is mentioned that biological costs (or the metabolic price of something like a big brain) are "a measure of the increased energy metabolism that is required to achieve a function." Then there are reproductive costs - life-history & somatic/reproductive tradeoffs - a whole other topic... perhaps related to information costs (the signalling and screening games that play out in asymmetrical markets are a lot like those that play out in sexual selection - Akerloff, Spence and Stigliz).

Is there a noise function in cost theory? Is the process of a diminishing marginal return analogous or commensurate with the increase of noise in a communications channel?

These are really half-formed, messy impulses and desires to learn. They may be very clear to people schooled in economics, perhaps behind some math I can't parse. But I have yet to find a non-mathematical general conceptualization of cost that systematizes all of the observations in this field. In the very little bit of game theory I've done, different games impose different configurations of costs or types of cost on players... I feel like the topic is still foggy, in my own mind certainly.

For Tanya

2010-09-20T11:32:00.002-04:00

Your fingers
Deftly slicing week-old plums
In a pool of light next to mine
Sorting veggies into tubs
Before our dawn commute

Aging alongside me
Every imperfect moment
Choosing to spend it
Together

Mergers/Acquisitions Theory and the Culture Wars

2010-07-27T11:23:00.000-04:00

The culture wars between liberals and conservatives can be framed in many ways. Some of my favourites include George Lakoff's Moral Politics framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)), and Johnathan Haidt's Five Moral Bases framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt). But while these frameworks help illuminate the difference between the two worldviews, they don't offer us too many tools for understanding the interplay between them.

After all, we currently live in a bistable political world that oscillates between these two attractors, with liberal and conservative regimes successively replacing each other as electorates react to the excesses of incumbents. That leaves a lot of liberal and conservatives in charge of things who need to interact with each other. How can we work together? (Although even the desire to do so is a liberal trait, I realize, which may be one reason why conservatism is so effective in zero-sum contests, and why people flock to conservative positions when under us/them threat.)

I've recently stumbled upon the work of Harrison Trice and Janice Beyer, who published a book called The Culture of Work Organizations in 1993. Discussing mergers and aquisitions, they point out that these often fail due to cultural incompatibility between organizations. They distinguish between cultural innovation and cultural maintenance, and point out that cultural innovation entails much greater perceived risk, cost, uncertainty and effort. Cultural maintenance is much easier, and is a very powerful bulwark against felt-uncertainty.

Now, change management theories have pretty much always envisioned the change process as a journey from the current state, through a transition process, to a new stable state, so even cultural innovators are working towards an end. This sometimes leads to a phenomenon of stable orthodoxies emerging among ideological liberals, which provide easy targets for conservative critics.

But the truth is that change is disruptive, and risky, and to sway "dual-frame" or "undecided" supporters, liberals need to do things that limit that risk and emphasize continuity as well as change. Cultural innovation needs to be rooted in stablity, and move towards it.

Cultural innovation includes:
- Creating a new culture: recognizing past cultural differences and setting realistic expectations for change
- Changing the culture: weakening and replacing the old cultures
Cultural maintenance includes:
- Integrating the new culture: reconciling the differences between the old cultures and the new one
- Embodying the new culture: Establishing, affirming, and keeping the new culture

A full list of tactics for doing so is listed here: http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_trice_beyer_changing_organizational_cultures.html

One thing this framework does for me is explain something that has long puzzled me. It is the apparent paradox noted by Thomas Frank in his book What's the Matter With Kansas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas) - namely, how is it that so many low-income people are so immediately ready to vote against their apparent interests, stepping up as stalwart conservatives to support governments whose policies vastly increase the disparity between rich and poor?

I've seen such obviously poor people adorned in emblems of patriotism, stepping forward to boldly declare their fealty to the rich, their faces glowing with virtue, pledging to support candidates who will pull away what fragile safety nets remain beneath them and trade their jobs and communities away via computerized stock exchange selling programs...

I think part of what's going on is that cultural maintenance is an opportunity for heroism. When change causes pain, the stance of saying "no" to people trying to change things offers people a sense of agency, of importance, of solidarity in the face of calamity. Low-income conservatives may feel more secure by embodying the dominant culture, and degrading efforts to reform it. An us/them mentality intensifies this commitment.

The painful irony is that the changes that are radically changing the income equation for working class people in G7 countries have been caused by the opening up of huge trade pacts encompassing hugely different economies, and the people who have profited most from this expansion are a miniscule economic elite class. But this elite class is able to motivate working people against liberals who actually *are* trying to reduce the impact of this huge sea-change on working families, by painting those liberals as elites. And liberalism *is* associated with cultural elites, in part no doubt because you need the luxury of time to expose yourself to culturally innovative ideas, weakening your investment in ideas of the past and allowing yourself the cognitive freedom to imagine change without also imagining insecurity.

Sigh... I so hate fighting against that easy circling of the wagons and the us/them rhetoric of ridicule that is so easy and accessible to people on the right. That rhetoric is so appealing to so many, and so hard to overcome once it's been used against you...

Project Documentation as Incantational Magic

2010-03-11T12:34:00.004-05:00

Last night, my wife and I were commiserating about writing out project documentation following fixed templates. There are all of these headings, and it feels like the only reason you have to write down something under each heading is so that some project auditor can work their audit trail and check off on their little checklist that each section was filled out. It seems to be form without function. There is so much repetition involved, so much stuff that makes you want to write:"see scetion "C", above")... plus stuff you just make up in order to fill the gap. It is easy to feel like this kind of writing is futile.

However, this morning on the bus ride in, I was reading an "Impact Assessment" document I had written late last year for a training program I am developing. It was one of those department-mandated documents with lots of mandatory headings, and when I was writing it, I felt all the frustrations I referred to above. It felt like a repetitive, persnickey, process-heavy and unnecessarily long production.

Reading it again a few months later was an interesting experience. I realized *so* much all of a sudden.

First of all, reading it as I did - I have my mind full of other pre-occupations, I haven't thought about this in awhile, I only have a brief time to look at it and I am thinking of other things I have to do soon... I began to realize how important that repetition is for slowly easing the attention of the reader to the main points. You can lay all of the main points out once, but the reader's mind is fragmented by other preoccupations, so they barely skim it and get it in the first time. But then, as they read on, section after section, as the message is re-framed and re-delivered, with slight variations that highlight different aspects of it, with consistency that builds over time... it starts to sink in. The consistency and rhythm become soothing. It calms your busy mind and softens you up to receive the message.

It's like music. The reason it isn't just a quick memo is because it isn't supposed to work like communication, it's supposed to work like music - to lull and immerse readers in the idea, and to support their own imaginations as they get into the emotional and physical world of the idea (or in other words, to make them fully present to the idea).

Suddenly, the repetitive structure of the document made perfect sense. Classical music - all classical musics - modern and old, across cultures - are all about themes and variations. So is jazz, so are folk musics... but think about Philip Glass for a moment - there's that recognizable theme, repeating, with slight variations in the instrumentation, slight overlaps of the themes, minor chromatic shifts, but each repetition of the theme pulls you in and through the piece, and into this attentive frame of mind where the experience of the piece becomes increasingly vivid and real to you.

*That's* the kind of composition those repetitive documents are like. To us, when we are writing them, the repetition seems pointless because we already stated the point once, and we don't understand why we have to do so again. But for a preoccupied mind - one who picks up the document to resurrect an awareness of the project but who has not thought about it at all for awhile prior to picking up the document - the first statement of the theme is barely heard through their mental clutter, but by slightly varying and restating the theme in section after section - slowly they get lulled into the state of mind that at some point - probably a different point for each reader - the project inhabits their mind fully, and they inhabit the project mind.

At that point they may set the document aside, and not finish it, and miss some important detail that was in the document, but that they ask you about, even if it was written there, and they did not take the time to read it all the way. That is not stupid or an insult, if you know why those kinds of documents exist - which is that they are musical compositions that get everybody attuned to the mental model of the project.

Repetitive documents also serve a double-function as reference material, so that people who need to look up some specific fact needs to be able to find it under some specific heading that is easy to find, so again, the fact that you kind of echo the overall theme (with variations) under each heading is part of the magic of these documents - so that even though they are hunting out some specific detail, there is enough of the main "tune" there to revive their awareness of the overall picture.

This seems so pointless when we are writing, and the awareness of the theme is total for us, but reading it months later while multi-tasking, it is *such* a usable document format!!

And you know what, I recently had a meeting about this training program with my manager, and she and I did not read the impact assessment document beforehand. As a result, we re-invented a lot of what had already been written in the document. I realized, while reading the older document on the bus this morning, that this was okay.

Part of enculturating a team of people with an imaginary world (a future project is a state we are imagining, and we want to make it true, but nonetheless we are doing the same thing storytellers are doing on some level), is repeating and restaging the core messages. So you can do so beautifully once in a clear document that everybody loves, and everybody praises that document, but then the fragmented multi-tasking nature of the organization means that their awareness and "fusion" with that imaginary world subsides. Later, in another event, you may do something else, including brainstorming anew as if the first document had never been written. This is not a way of invalidating or disrespecting the first document, and it is not stupid. It is smart. Part of your job as a communicator around projects is to restage the invocation of the product vision many times. It may give rise to multiple restatements of similar ideas, but these are just recordings of your various performances. They should all be good, and as a professional, you should know that your job is to perform the same high-valued tunes repeatedly.

Your job in invoking the reality of an invisible, imaginary world over and over until it is made real for people is a lot like the role of a priest or a shaman. The believers all know the core messages you bring up as you perform for them, but to keep that vision alive against the onslaught of everyday life, they need you to bring down the magic over and over again, in ways that keep them on track. Don't expect it to follow the logic of reason, because that is not what you are being asked to do. Your task has the logic of magic, not reason. You are successful if your produce many different artifacts (documents, presentations, minutes, emails, phone calls), and each one repeats goals visions and key points in a gently supportive and evocative way, with infinite patience, because each time you do that is another successful instance of you making this invisible world real for people - in their minds - so that they are then empowered to make it real for real - in reality - an executed project.

Given the normal chaos of organizational life, not everyone will access all the right documents, or not in the right order, and those who do may be so busy that key points are driven out of their mind, or they may not access the documents frequently enough, or have missed updates, etc. This is normal, and part of your job in working the magic is to use repetition, theme and variations across all of your productions so that no matter where they hook up to your project, they can start to hum along with the rest of the crew.

One of the universal structures of human folk musics and even animal communications is the "call-response" structure. In this kind of song, a song leader calls out a phrase, and a chorus of listeners repeats the call. Performers in live concert often start up call-response sequences with their audience, jazz musicians improvise by having one instrument throw out leads while the ensemble responses, soldiers do call-response chants while marching, cheerleading squads use them... some cultures have very rich call response folk music traditions.

Each point of communication is like a call, and you know that it is hard to participate in a call-response song if you don't really know the song. Performers who try call-response sequences in concert often fall flat because the audience doesn't know the words of the song well enough. So your role is to put out calls that enable the chorus to respond because you awaken enough of the whole song in their mind for them to participate. Each communicative fragment is like another call, and it's okay that some of them are repetitive. Call-response games are supposed to be repetitive - that's what makes the format possible.

"The Lord is my shepherd" - think about that idea in the context of organizational life. People are like sheep darting off in all directions while the project dictates they all need to get their heads up and move off for a long journey in one sustained direction. Your job as a priest/representative of the imaginary goal world is to herd those sheep and get them all moving. Each section of a repetitive document, and each repetitive document in a project, and each redundant meeting - is actually a border collie, and you need to deploy several of them around the herd of sheep to enable the herd to move.

So the fact that you have to deploy more than one collie is good, normal and to be expected. As a skilled shepherd, your job is actually to bring forward and deploy multiple border collies, so make sure each collie has a full enough set of the information for the project that it can do its job. One key/dominant sheep may not see your brown collie, only your black one, so every collie has to be a repetition of enough of the overall theme to keep all sheep oriented to the correct direction.

It's a different way of understanding your work. It changes perceptions. Things that seem like organizational/bureaucratic irrationality turn into understandable human dynamics of making the imaginary real. This is how humans normally make the imaginary real - themes, variations, repetition, multiple instances, multiple reminders, multiple re-enactments... that's how a pastor thinks of his or her job list for the year, and that's how a business analyst should think about her role as well - this is part of the magic of the role.

The recursive nature of it is not a useless waste of effort to be resisted - it's the performance. A musician has to practice a piece of music thousands of times and perform it live thousands of times and produce recordings that are played millions of times in order to create a timeless classic. That's the art form. That's what it is. That's what you have to be good at! That's the value you bring to the organization. That's what they count on you for.

Repetitions of project themes aren't wasted reminders to people who can't keep things straight, they are incantations - each one helps bring the imaginary world into real life. If you lovingly and patiently repeat those incantations when people turn to you, relying on you to work your magic once more and bring the invisible world into mental life for them, then you will be succeeding at your task. If you bristle with resentment because you thought you already sent them that message so that now if they don't know what you sent them, they are disrespecting you and your prior investment of time and energy, you are missing the point and misunderstanding your role.

You yourself, if you were taken off your own project, not given time to read the document for a year, and then were brought back to lead the project, would appreciate someone kindly re-invoking the mental model of the project for you in your mind - you would need that, and if someone could do it artfully without making you read your own prior document, in a way that repeated the key themes with subtle variations that were aimed at what you need to know right now, this very minute, you would appreciate their incantation - their magic words of resurrecting the reality of the project to your mind.

So that's your profession. You're a project magician! And your spells are musical compositions that lull people into alternate (achievable!) realities in the world of imagination. The more you succeed at re-invoking those visions into life in peoples' minds over and over again, the better your team will be at making them real, hitting their targets, and enjoying success.

A definition of poetry

2008-07-02T10:47:00.002-04:00

In the book "The Journalist's Craft", the poet Peter Meinke offers up a definition of poetry as "news that stays news". This to me is a cool idea worthy of a blog entry just to say that!

Carpenter of the Sun

2008-06-23T10:18:00.003-04:00

I'm not the kind of person who likes a lot of poems. It's rare I find one I really like. Here's one of them.

CARPENTER OF THE SUN

My child goes forth to fix the sun,
a hammer in his hand and a pocketful of nails.
Nobody else has noticed the crack.

Twilight breaks on the kitchen floor.
His hands clip and hammer the air.
He pulls something out,

something small, like a bad tooth,
and he puts something back,
and the kitchen is full of peace.

All this is done very quietly,
without payment or promises.

- Nancy Willard

Elements of Taste

2008-06-23T09:33:00.003-04:00

I just love compositional guidelines and design principles. It fascinates me to no end that basic design principles such as balance, contrast, repetition, form and the like show up in so many domains of life. Right now I am looking at a book called The Elements of Taste by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, and they have a great little system for composing flavours and textures to make creative dishes. I won't share any of their recipes here, but I will describe some of their more interesting design ideas.

NARRATIVE: There are narrative arcs in eating experiences. When you take a bite of something, there is an initial flavour/texture - an "introduction" or an "attack" flavour. Flavours then build and change into the middle of the mouthful. They may peak to a climax, or build through the middle to a big finish, or broaden through the middle towards a mellow finish, or whatever. Then there is the finish and the aftertaste.

Finish and aftertaste become the context for the next mouthful of the food, so the time you spend eating one dish will also have a beginning, middle and end. One of my favourite experiences at this level are "slow burn" foods like chili, Indian/African curries or many Korean dishes, which start out with a sharp spicy attack, but then you get used to the spices and things mellow out into the middle, but by the end the burn has built up so much that you are starting to sweat.

The courses of a meal have a narrative structure too, so you can start out with a fresh opening, shift to a savoury slow burn middle, and end with a tangy, floral, sweet dessert, for example. Each act of the meal, beginning, middle and end, can also have a cast of characters - several different flavour/texture/temperature elements that diners will play off against (or with) each other as they eat. Kunz and Kaminsky call this level of food analysis the TASTE LOGIC of a meal.

This idea is too cool!

TASTE PLATFORMS: Kunz and Kaminsky isolate four taste platforms or basic scaffoldings for other elements of the taste experience: GARDEN, MEATY, OCEANIC and STARCHY. These are pretty self-explanatory. One cool thing I inferred from their recipes is that GARDEN palettes allow for a lot of crunch and colour, but also that flavours are often chosen to amplify each other in GARDEN food - e.g. adding both cherry tomatoes and orange bell peppers to a salad to multiply the sweet, tangy and floral notes in the salad. With MEATY platforms, balance is more often sought, bringing salt, tanginess, bulby/allium flavours (onions/garlic/shallots), sweetness, vinted (wine) and funky (age-related - old cheeses, etc) into harmony with each other. There are also two main MEATY notes - the deep flavours of dark meats and the top notes of white meats.

OCEANIC palettes are often already salty, and adding tang and herbaceousness can bring the delicate flavours out more. So like GARDEN, multiplication of flavour is a basic compositional strategy here. STARCHY palettes can be full and nutty, bland and supportive of other flavour elements (providing contrast and balance) or crisp/toasted. Starch and tang really cut each other nicely - witness vinegar on french fries.

So the two levels of TASTE LOGIC and FLAVOUR PLATFORMS set the stage for the drama, the actual actors are the tastes, which Kunz and Kaminsky divide into three categories:

- TASTES THAT PUSH (Salty, picante, sweet)
- TASTES THAT PULL (Tangy, vinted, bulby, spiced aromatic, floral herbal, funky)
- TASTES THAT PUNCTUATE (Bitter)

PUSHING means heightening all the other tastes in a recipe. Salt, spicy heat and sweetness all bring out other flavours. They up the whole flavour profile of the dish. PULLING tastes tend to isolate aspects of the underlying or overall taste of a dish to accentuate it. They make flavours more distinct instead of smoothing them or rounding them out. TANG can heighten and accent the SWEET and FLORAL of fruit, and FUNKY tastes like truffles accentuate the MEATINESS of earthy, savoury dishes.

BITTER has a special role. It slams the brakes on other flavours. Beer is a sugary drink and it would be far too sweet and cloying without the bitterness of hops to slam the brakes on that sweetness. Having cranberry sauce with meat is not the equivalent of having jam on your meat because the bitterness of cranberries slams the brakes on that sweetness and prevents it from overpowering the taste. Salt licorice is incredibly salty, but it is edible because the bitterness of the unsweetened (or is it semi-sweetened) licorice stands guard against all that salt. Conversely, too much bitterness can be countered by salt, sweet, floral or aromatic, etc. Bitterness helps create structure in the food that can hold up to stronger flavourings.

So that's the gist of their system. It is very interesting. The recipes in the book are illuminating as well, although they are a bit fancier than anything I would make myself. I love their design vocabulary, though. It rocks!

Essentially Contested Concepts

2008-06-11T20:54:00.004-04:00

This is another cool idea, similar to the "invincible rhetoric" concept I discussed in my previous posting. The idea was initially expressed by W. B. Gallie in 1955, and then revisited by John Kekes in 1970.

Essentially Contested Concepts (ECCs) are "Big Concepts" like the following: art, love, morality, reason, nature, democracy, culture, knowledge, science, truth etc. The concepts are vague, ambiguous, highly general, and also highly valued. There is constant debate over the proper use of these terms, such as whether or not a particular installation of objects is "really art" or not. Very often, people will disagree over how these ECCs should be used. Each side in such a dispute feels that they are making the proper use of the term, but they are also aware that the other side does not agree with them on that very point. Nonetheless, neither side is prepared to concede the term to the other side, and pick a different term that better captures their side of the distinction. Instead, they go to war over who gets custodianship of the ECC.

Gallie described 7 conditions which together define an ECC. I review them here:
1) It defines some kind of valued achievement.
2) That achievement must be internally complex, with many parts adding up to make the whole achievement.
3) HOWEVER, there are several possible ways to interpret HOW the sub-components contribute to the end value, and these interpretations need not be consistent with each other.
4) The achievement itself must be adaptive or modifiable, capable of being expressed differently in different circumstances.
5) The ECC must be simultaneously used both defensively and aggressively - when you take a stand and say "art is x", you are consciously aware that some people say "art is y", and your articulation of your position includes an opposition to theirs.

These first five points describe what an ECC is, but they fail to distinguish ECCs from other concepts around which communication is merely radically confused. Gallie's solution to this problem was to appeal to history - to an ideal exemplar that everyone can agree to as an example of the concept (point 6); and this exemplar must also be internally complex, so that the final performance of the concept depends on the performance of composite activities in ways that are not clearly straightforward (point 7). The exemplar provides the indisputable shared point of reference that distinguishes an ECC from an idea that is merely confused, but yet that example too is complex enough to be essentially contested.

Kekes offers 6 conditions for something to be considered an ECC:
1) ECCs signify some kind of voluntary activity - they involve conscious human conduct and choices. Thus their essential defining characteristic can be thought of as either the activity itself or its goal - the means or the ends, or both.
2) ECCs are evaluative, and the conflict over them is value-charged, with participants putting great weight into which side will prevail because of the evaluations that will be implied.
3) The contest over an ECC will be in the interests of the participants, because the single concept being disputed concerns their best way of satisfying their needs and achieving their goals.
4) Like Gallie, Kekes states that the goal-directed activities that can be classified as instances of an ECC must be internally complex, with many elements each of which plays a role in the performance of that activity. These elements have certain qualities - one element must be something the agent does or has, and could stop doing or having without ceasing to be an agent, and the elements do not each have value of their own (they do not achieve a piece of the goal in isolation). Only the goal state is evaluated, and the constituent activities gain their value from that fact.
5) The component activities must be variously accessible - people will disagree about how significant each element's contribution is to the overall performance.
6) Despite all of this dispute at component levels, participants in the debate have to agree about the general description of the domain they are contesting, and they must share the core problem that prompts the debate in the first place. (This general agreement takes the place of Gallie's appeal to history.)

It seems to me that ECCs and invincible rhetoric are related - both are produced in part by human source-monitoring limitations. These source-monitoring limitations may be caused by general working-memory limitations, or as a side effect/pathology of our capacity to generalize across exemplars. At any rate, if we cannot all agree on how to weigh all the source components of the final goal-achievement, then we are likely to choose explanations that we like based on some extrinsic preferences or some general bias.

This has my Spidey-sense humming... there is some kind of shared pattern here...

W. B. Gallie's paper was in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-56] pp. 167-198, and in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. John Kekes' paper was in Philosophy and Rhetoric 10(2) [Spring 1977].

Invincible Rhetoric

2008-06-04T12:20:00.004-04:00

Okay, so this is a seriously cool idea about a seriously annoying phenomenon - the phenomenon of invincible rhetoric. People who use invincible rhetoric are always right. They will stress a point one way to be right in another situation, but then when you bring up an objection they have another stock answer for that one too. A quick example of the difference would be the two sayings "haste makes waste" and "the early bird gets the worm".

A person who enjoys dispensing post-hoc advice will always be infallibly wise, if their knowledge base supports both of these claims. These two invincibly paired proverbs are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. In some contexts one proverb applies, and in other contexts the other does. However, sometimes when you want to challenge the advice someone gives you, you want to hold them to one claim-context pairing or another. This can be difficult. Since their assumption base contains both beliefs, they can stipulate either of the opposing points as what they "really" meant, and in so doing, they can re-contextualize or re-frame the debate. If they keep shifting within their assumption base just so as not to be wrong, this should be criticized as a type of invalid argumentation. This is a subtle and infuriating case of the if-by-whisky fallacy of infallibility.

Any kind of unassailable belief system enables invincible rhetoric. Religious people - truly religious people - don't make a fetish about being "right" all of the time, instead they use their faith to commit to meaningful lived actions amidst the uncertainties of life. However, religious literalists and armchair apologists often do crow with pride about how their belief system can answer every question and withstand every argumentative challenge. They can mount this kind of invincible facade because they have an assumptions base that generates invincible rhetoric. For example:

- SUPREMACY CLAIM: Their religion is the one true religion (of many thousands throughout human history), and their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god wants everyone to know this and to follow this one religion (sect).
- AGENCY COUNTER: If that is what this omnipotent being wants, why doesn't it just make it so, or make it obvious to each one of us.
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: This one god wants people to believe in it for the 'right' reasons, so it sent a message through a very narrow channel (one person/tradition) instead of a broad one, and deliberately made it difficult to believe in it, so that people can 'prove' their belief and loyalty in the face of opposition, disbelief and persecution.
- BURDEN OF PROOF COUNTER: Why would an omnipotent, omnipresent being need or value oaths of recognition and fealty from much more limited beings, such that it would set up these kinds of ordeals and tests?
- SHIFT TO 'GIFT OF LOVE' FRAMEWORK: It loved us so much it gave us free will, which we abused to turn away from it. But it loves us so much it sent us messages and signs to lead us back.
- INCONSISTENCY COUNTER: So it gave us the means to do what it did not want us to do, in order that we would do what it does want us to do?
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: For the right reasons - that we may prove ourselves worthy.
- RATIONALITY COUNTER: Based on what we know about agency, intentions, and the scope and scale of subjective goals and concerns, it does not make much sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being to develop these kinds of intricate tests of loyalty. However, it makes perfect sense that human groupings develop these kinds of in-group tests of belonging and commitment.
- SHIFT TO THE 'MYSTERY' FRAMEWORK: How can you claim to understand the reasons or motives of such a supreme being? All of our concepts are so limited in trying to understand god. He has revealed himself to us in the only way we can understand, but he is far greater than our understanding. All we can do is accept what he has shown us in his benevolence.

This kind of thing has a great sense of felt-closure to it. There is an answer to every objection, and it seems irrefutable, despite the fact that the different frameworks or assumption bases in the rhetoric are not all perfectly consistent with each other. It is odd that supreme beings demand all kinds of commitment signals from humans. It is also odd that supreme beings with no limitations would leak their message out through narrow and protected channels. Why not just tell everybody? But there is a framework in apologetics - call it the SHIFT TO THE HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK - that this being *has* told everybody, but people are just too busy, confused, misled, numb or fallen to notice the message that is everywhere. But this is inconsistent with the need to be loyal to one specific channel for this message.

These objection-countering themes can wax and wane throughout a discussion with a religious literalist, creating a position that they feel is unassailable because it has an answer for every challenge. However, the coherence between the answers is loose, and reliant on dubious premises which would support conclusions the religious person might not endorse. The only thing notable about their invincible rhetoric is that it is invincible, with no necessary indication that it is also correct. This makes it incredibly annoying to argue with them.

In a research paper called "The Invincible Character of Management Consultants' Rhetoric: How one blends incommensurates while keeping them apart" (Organization, Vol 7(4), 2000, p. 633-655), Johan Berglund and Andreas Werr describe how rhetoric of this sort draws its objection-countering power from the fact that we embrace a wide variety of master-narratives or root-metaphors as valuable for different explanatory contexts. By freely mixing arguments from more than one mythical system within the same discourse, we can construct a sequence of arguments that has an answer for any objection. The argumentation may also be easy to endorse, because we recognize the value of each argument within it. Receptive audiences for this kind of message react positively to the prima facie validity of each of the commonplaces of wisdom as they are trotted out, without reflecting on the fact that each commonplace is drawn from a very different discursive context, and as such they cannot really be jointly applied against the same objection.

In the religious example I used above, there is the "Omnipotent Creator" mythic system, which emphasizes an unbroken narrative of cause and effect (except for the cause of God itself, which is never given, and so the creator myth still fails to explain how it all started. It just shifts the creation-from-nothing from an object-protagonist - the universe - to an equally inexplicably pre-existing subject-protagonist; the creator. This probably seems plausible to each individual human who believes it because they were once tiny kids with huge parents who *were* their world, so it makes sense that subjects precede the world). Then there is the "Ordeals of Faith" myth, whereby God tests the loyalty of those who believe in it, and the way to be down with God is to prove your unshakable faith no matter how sparse the evidence, or how hard the test. This sits uneasily with the "Omniscient judge" myth, according to which God would already know how loyal you were anyway, thereby requiring no test to find out...

If you freely counter objections raised relative to one mythic system by drawing on another mythic system without noticing that the story lines are kind of distinct, then you can always have an answer for every objection without noticing their incompatibility, because each answer draws on mythic systems which are fuzzily-distinct enough to prevent the conflicts from being noticed. This is unbelievably infuriating for us rationalist types, to the seeming great delight (at times) of those who manage to silence our objections without having to submit any of their incommesurable beliefs to Occam's razor.

This phenomenon is similar to one of the cognitive defects that Pascal Boyer identifies as one cause of religious belief in "Religion Explained"; specifically "Source Monitoring Defects". We do not recall or activate our awareness of the distinct sources of distinct knowledge types. Other defects Boyer analyzes include the well-known "Confirmation Bias", "Cognitive Dissonance Reduction", "Consensus Effects" and "Memory Illusions", all of which can conspire to efface the disparate sources of wisdom to create invincible rhetoric, where incommensurable ideas cohabit in powerful ways.

However, this same infuriating aspect of religious literalist apologetics tells us something important about religion as a human cultural activity that should lead us to receive religious wisdom in a respectful manner (even if we don't believe that God exists in any kind of way besides in human culture). Religious wisdom has enormous power as a repository of important generalizations drawn from many domains of human life, compressed into non-argumentative mythic structures.

So religious belief will be full of inconsistency, and unacceptable as a rational description of how the universe works, but at the same time it will be a powerful mashup of observations and generalizations about all features of human life. This storied richness is a resource that people can draw on to act meaningfully in positive ways, and some religious people who are committed to this kind of lived religion are empowered to do more good than they would otherwise have attempted. Thus people who take the love of wisdom seriously will attend to the wisdom of the irrational, even while rejecting it as a description of the world, and remaining vigilent against its capacity to empower people to do more evil than they might otherwise do, as well. What goes for religion can also go for all kinds of human discourses that are non-scientific, such as the pop psychology and pop business writing were a great many important observations may come together in ways similar to how root metaphors come together in religious traditions.

There are thus thoughtful ways for rationalists to engage religious ideas, pop-psychological ideas, folk wisdom, managerial/self-help guru-dom, and other such cultural repositories of meaning. Nevertheless, invincible rhetoric remains totally infuriating, and when it is being used as a dodge, people should really be called on it.

Interaction Design

2008-05-26T10:46:00.003-04:00

Jennifer Tidwell is the author of the O'Reilly book "Designing Interfaces", and author of a couple of websites: designinginterfaces.com and the older and soon retiring UI Patterns and Techniques site. Reading her stuff is fun because you suddenly get names for all of the user interface elements and experiences you've been having interacting with all of your life (or half of it, for some of us). I just like reading her work and gaining that clarity through labeling my experience. I love what she said (my notes are older, and she may have updated it) about user interfaces for "Navigable Spaces like the web and related technologies. She reckon(s/ed) that Navigable Spaces usually need to supply users with:

- "Map" views of navigable spaces
- Clear Entry Points
- The ability to Go Back One Step
- Some kind of "home" page or base state which allows users to Go Back To A Safe Place
- Some way of recording an Interaction History
- Progress Indicators (e.g. breadcrumbs)
- Bookmarks
- User Annotations
- Pointers that signal the user about what kind of actions they can take (like when an arrow cursor turns into a finger cursor when mouseover on a list)
- Short Descriptions of nodes that save the user from having to take on too much info at once (search engines serve this up for us)
- Disabled Irrelevant Things that can be cleared away if necessary
- Optional Detail on Demand
- Easy icons to aggregate Convenient Environment Actions
- Good Defaults

That's it. I just think it's cool to have names for stuff like that...

Defining Management 1

2008-05-26T07:20:00.004-04:00

Defining management is not a task that produces closure. It's more contingent on the purposes of your exposition. However, there is one fairly concise one that I appreciate, and I think it kind of sums up the generic views I have about management. The source for this is a paper that Karl Wiig from the Knowledge Research Institute has posted at http://www.krii.com/articles.htm , called The Intelligent Enterprise and Knowledge Management. He actually isn't defining management in this paper, but intelligence more broadly. I guess I must see the role of management as the intelligent guidance of organizations, in part.

Anyway, he says that people in organizations need pertinent expertise in order to:
- Provide competent handling of both well-known and less-known tasks.
- Provide innovative approaches to work and all other endeavors.
- Evaluate the consequences of actions.
- Manage relationships and work environments.
- Conserve resources.
- Support personal and enterprise renewal.

I think that sums up what management is all about, at a shoot-from-the-hip, generic level.

Virtual Teams, Distance Work, Silence and Resentment

2007-01-29T07:59:00.005-05:00

I work in Distance Ed, and I've been working on distance/virtual teams for a long time. The unique problem with distance work/distance management, I think, is the lack of shared context. When you all work in the same office, you know when someone is sick, on vacation, overloaded or working to a deadline on something. So if they do not respond to a request of yours right away, you understand. When you don't have that contextual information, then when somebody doesn't get back to you, the reason is a mystery. You just get a sense that the person is unreliable, or thinks you are unimportant. Then you resent them for that.

Basic attribution theory suggests that this is a natural way to respond when lacking contextual info, but it is very destructive on virtual/distance teams!!

One way around this is to spend time at the beginning of a distance collaboration with everybody together in one space, to synchronize everybody's internal sense/mental models of themselves, each other, the team, the task and the timeline. Then you have to meet face-to-face periodically to re-synchronize and keep your collective "groove" fresh.

Here's something I wrote elsewhere on this topic:

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

Advantages of Collaboration at a Distance over Collocated (local) Collaboration (Shunn et al., 2002):

On virtual teams:

- Info sharing can be more even (all members have more to share, because as a group they have access to more/more varied information sources, by virtue of being in different contexts)
- Wider influx of ideas, wider variety of mental models (same idea as above)
- Less tendency for groupthink, regionalism, conformity
- Asynchronous communications more thoughtful, measured and complete than live conversation, and better-structured for persistence and re-use
- Asynchronous communications tend to be more durable
- Collaboration of any kind involves a rhythm of social integration and then going off to do solo work - the "solo" part of this work cycle unfolds with less disruption when collaborating at a distance

However:

- Frequent face-to-face meetings are important, esp. at beginning of a collaboration (e.g. weekly)

---------------------
WHY?
---------------------

DISTANCE COLLABORATION DISRUPTS INTERACTIVE GROUNDING

Copresent collaborators can build the common ground that will sustain the successful distance collaboration, through dense and rich interactions.

In copresent communications, they can coordinate conversational turn-taking, respond to the precisely timed conversational cues of their collaborators, repair misunderstandings in real time. As a result, the mental model each collaborator forms of the other collaborators' communication styles, frames of reference, assumption bases and cognitive processes, greatly facilitating coordination during solo work phases.

Collocal meetings inculcate task, team and context awareness. "People keep up with information about the demand for their work in the real world, how particular tasks are progressing, what fellow workers are doing, who is communicating with whom, what equipment is out of order, and many other details of the collaboration that concern them directly or tangentially. Here we distinguish between awareness of the task (e.g. what steps have to be taken next…) and awareness of the collaborative team (e.g., who knows what among the members…). Developing and maintaining this team awareness is much more difficult in distributed teams than collocated ones.

Task awareness, which includes collaborators' beliefs about the overall project, including its history, current status, and future directions, is crucial for successful coordination. When collaborators divide work, they need to monitor their partners' activities for personnel management and to understand the impact of their partners' progress on their own work. This monitoring can help people determine when and which collaborative actions are required (e.g. whether it is time to nag someone to complete his or her section of the project). The granularity with which collaborators need to maintain task awareness differs depending on the nature of the task…

Team awareness, on the other hand, refers to collaborators' beliefs about both stable and changing attributes of their partners. Detailed and accurate models of each other's knowledge, skills, and motivation help collaborators assign tasks appropriately and solicit and offer appropriate help. Collaborators share beliefs about project roles and responsibilities, interdependencies among team members, the current status of each person's assigned tasks, their availability for interaction, and the like…Equally important, when team members are collocated, they can passively monitor activities going on around them and pick up relevant information without explicit communication… This passive monitoring of other's activities aids collaboration… [e.g.]members of a team pick up information about each other while training side by side, which allows them to allocate tasks more effectively.
Not only do collocated teams pick up information implicitly, but they also share a context that helps them accurately interpret this information… the lack of shared context leads to misattributions for behaviour, resulting in poorer coordination and distrust. For example, one member may send another mail asking for an update, but does not get a response because the recipient is on vacation. In a distributed team, the lack of shared context often led to ambiguity about interpreting silence, which in turn resulted in failures of coordination and distrust… failure to respond to mail was attributed negatively to the person (that person is unreliable) rather than to the situation (the mail did not get through or the team was on vacation). By contrast, in a collocated setting, vacation schedules and availability would likely be known." (Kraut et al., 2002 p. 153-154)

THE IMPLICATION of the first study is that when collaborators take the time up front to build shared cognitive models through interactive grounding, then they can better withstand the corrosive effects of distance collaboration, and reap the rewards of distributive work efforts.

THE RISK to virtual organizations such as our own is that we fail to recognize the strategic importance of building a cohesive group through real-time, face to face interactions, and so many of our distance interactions will be compromised by insufficient shared grounding.

REFERENCES:
Kraut, Robert E., Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan and Jane Siegel, "Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work" p. 137. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Schunn, Christian, Kevin Crowley and Takeshi Okada, "What Makes Collaborations Across a Distance Succeed? The Case of the Cognitive Science Community", p. 407. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

If God is not an idiot...

2006-11-28T10:48:00.002-05:00

I recently had the extreme misfortune of taking part in a debate over evolution. I don't know why I even bother.

Religious deniers of evolution... (sigh)... have certain commonplace objections to it, and they tend to be really kind of exotic. They sometimes attack the accuracy of carbon dating (as if the theory relied on carbon dating!), or they attack the very idea of biogenesis - of life emerging from non-life, as if that is some huge insurmountable gap to be crossed that even an infinite amount of compositional variation and selection could never give rise to... (a bit of a red herring, since all current scientific theories of biogenesis are provisional anyhow - this subject area is still in its early days)...

Other favored tactics involve asking what came "before" the big-bang (which displays a total ignorance of how spacetime dimensionality is best understood), or showing that random variation could never lead to complex organs like eyes (which in fact are not so complex and which have emerged many times along different species lineages, in several different designs - if this seems hard to digest, start with the fact that pigments react to light, whether they are in an organism or just lying around, but the ones in organisms thus come to carry info about the outside world as a simple result of responding to light...)

Most religious argumentation against evolution betrays a failure of the imagination as well, specifically a failure to imagine scale - the scale of cosmological/evolutionary time, and the incredible power of combinatorial processes...

But look... Evolution-deniers really don't have to get so fancy to disprove evolutionary theory. It would be extraordinarily easy to disprove evolutionary theory. All you have to do is find one single population of organisms. That's it. The population has to have certain characteristics, of course, but once you find it, evolutionary theory as we know it will be forced to its knees.

You can challenge or disprove evolution if you can find a population of organisms where:

1) There are different (inheritable) traits across organisms;

2) The different traits lead to some organisms having more reproductive success than others, and these traits are inherited by their children who thus also have more reproductive success (i.e. more grandchildren per parent down the successful lineage;

3) Yet somehow, mysteriously, when you look at the genetic composition of each subsequent generation, most of the organisms are genetically related to the *less* reproductively successful ancestors, i.e. the grandparents that had the *fewest* (as few as zero) grandchildren.

Finding this population of organisms would refute evolutionary theory, or at least give it pause. Explaining this pattern of inheritance would force us to posit a new mechanism of inheritance not yet framed by science. For as long as no new mechanism (e.g genetic quantum tunneling?) were found, evolutionary theory would have to be provisionally considered incomplete. During that time period, people might speculate that perhaps certain lineages in these "inheritance without descent" species were "favoured by God", so that even though a "favoured" organism might have have the fewest descendants by way of reproduction, they have the most descendants via this favour - God puts the DNA of His favored organisms into subsequent generations, in violation of evolutionary principles... or something.

A very strong case of such a finding would be a population where *all* organisms do not demonstrate reproductive fitness, but rather eagerly get themselves eaten by predators as soon as possible, before reproducing. (They would be "manna", essentially...) Nevertheless, the species persists and thrives, growing with each generation. Finding a single such population would displace evolutionary theory as an acceptable general framework for biology (for the period of time within which no reproductive mechanism was understood).

Of course, find such species sounds like an impossible task, but only if we accept the scientific worldview of cause and effect. On a religious worldview, there is no reason why God could not intervene in the causal order of nature, and reshape future generations of a population as He saw fit, to give that population the characteristics noted above. Most emphatically, if He had any interest at all in disproving evolutionary theory, He could do it very easily by creating and maintaining such a population. The whole scientific/materialist worldview would be shaken by such a discovery.

If He thinks he can challenge the scientific worldview by making an image of the Virgin Mary appear in a grilled-cheese sandwich, or writing "Allah" on the side of a fish, (no offense and of course I say this for effect...) He's pretty dumb. The scientific worldview is *based* on ideas like the power of combinatorics and coincidence to produce patterns that may fortuitously be able to play a role in the context of some other system...

If God is not an idiot, and he wants to demonstrate his existence in the face of scientific skepticism or evolutionary reasoning, all he has to do is support *one* of the kinds of populations I have described above.

If religious people are serious about rebutting evolution, all they have to do is find it.

Passionate Love as a Plot Arc

2006-11-26T09:17:00.003-05:00

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how one might conceivably use Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" as an alternative plot arc for screenwriting - or at any rate as a plot arc for dramas of recognition. Actually, that book could support a whole genre of plot arcs, much like the Hero's journey does.

There is another sort of screenwriter's "scaffold" for creating plot arcs that I have found, and I think this one is even cooler. It is a model of passionate love described by Sharon S. Brehm in a book called "The Psychology of Love", edited by Robert J. Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes (Yale University Press, 1988).

In this article, Sharon Brehm describes her search for models of passionate love that are "passion-positive" rather than focusing on the destructive aspects of passion. She finds such models, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the writings of Christian mystics. Religious passion is ostensibly "desexualized", and hence escapes condemnation. However, clerics have often had occasion to tell certain zealots, ascetics and other passionate devout people to "tone down" their devotion... Excesses of passion are seen as dangerous everywhere, I guess...

Brehm did find a line of literary texts that dealt with passion, with a point of origin in the works of Marie-Henri Beyle a.k.a. Stendhal, and a point of insertion in a book by Dorothy Tennov called "Love and Limerance" (1979). Tennov notes that Stendhal is virtually unique among the students of love ("sopho-philiacs?") in his 'failure' to criticise, scold, castigate or caution the lover, the beloved or the experience of passionate love.

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the fact that, according to Brehm, Stendhal's theory of passionate love (developed in his work "De l'amour") describes several phases of the growth of passion, which turn out to be a loose but salient match to the vision of love described by St. Theresa of Avila (most fully described in "the Interior Castle" - her account of her own mystical experiences).

Hmmmm..... <=things that make ya go...

Each theory is summarized in turn. Keep in mind that my main interest is in a model for dramatic plotlines, not so much the theories per se.

STENDHAL's THEORY OF PASSIONATE LOVE

STAGE 1: ADMIRATION
The lover encounters the beloved and is attracted by his/her qualities. Since initial encounters are usually brief, these qualities are usually fairly superficial e.g. looks, sense of humor, charm, etc.

STAGE 2: ANTICIPATION
The lover begins to elaborate upon these impressions, imagining the pleasures that would come with a closer association with the beloved. The circumstances of the lover are important in this. If the lover is stuck in a boring routine, fantasy elaborations are more likely, as they are if the lover is romantically confident, bold or imaginative.

STAGE 3: HOPE
Once the lover starts investing time and energy in the elaboration of fantasies, hope must be evaluated to assess whether or not to escalate fantasies into plans or action preparedness. This evaluation is not a cold, rational accounting. It also depends greatly upon the circumstances the lover is in, as did stage 2.

STAGE 4: ROMANTIC ATTRACTION
Admiration, anticipation and hope together form the hook - or cupid's arrow. They give rise to what amounts to the *real* first stage of passionate love - "romantic attraction", or a "crush". This is the point at which the resolve to press things further is flirted with. Different subjects would do this with differing degrees of agency/patiency.

STAGE 5: CRYSTALIZATION
When you suddenly realize that you have fallen hard for somebody, they become outstandingly wonderful beings in your eyes. Stendhal referred to the "deification of a charming object", calling crystallization:

...that process of mind which discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at
every turn of events... it is sufficient to think of a perfection in order
to see it in the person you love...

Crystallization develops over time, and during this time, your friends begin to dread your late-night phone calls. Brehm describes it as "...an increasingly tight, closing system in which the world contracts to the beloved and the beloved fills all the world. The beloved becomes joy and beauty incarnate."

It *is* kind of pleasant... you have to admit!

Since the beloved comes to represent all joy and beauty, our anticipation of the delight we will experience with them expands in measure. This state is made only more intense by the terrible risk that the beloved might reject us, meaning that all of this anticipated wonderfulness will never come to pass. Eeeeeek!!

So there are three aspects of crystalization, which intermingle:
1) The increasingly self-perfecting image of the beloved
2) The imagined delights of being loved back by this perfect beloved
3) The terror of being rejected by irreplaceable source of delight

Increase or decrease any one of these pressures, and the others will increase or decrease along with it. In this, we find what Brehm calls the "quintessential Stendhalian proposition that passionate love depends on uncertainty and distance."
This quintessential proposition is so important that it supports the sixth stage of Love's progress...

STAGE 6: DOUBT
A serious blow, a serious threat, a rival, news that he/she may be moving... a major crisis of doubt is necessary to kick the obsession up a notch... up into...

STAGE 7: SECOND CRYSTALIZATION
This is full-blown obsession. The beloved is everything, reality-testing is seriously imaired. There is no more casual wondering about the beloved. Coincidence and chance vanish. Everything that happens is "destiny", a "sign", a "message"... Every nuance of the beloved's behaviour is scrutinized with intense focus on each detail and its posssible ramifications... for hints of interest, disinterest, acceptance, rejection... All other concerns and interests in life fade into nothingness.

At this point, your friends begin suggesting that you might want to consider getting professional help... you're scaring them now...

I think this gets us to the first major reversal of the second act. Motivation now exists for the exceptional course of action and its complications... or alternatively, for the tragic failure to act... or whatever...

--SIDEBAR--
What's good for love is good for hate, in dramatic terms, I would think... surely a passionate hate could be meaningfully represented as developing in essentially the same way that Stendhal describes for passionate love. This could be hatred of a person, like Iago's hatred for Othello, or the more abstract and global hatred of symbols of power, like "America", "Microsoft", "the market", "the right", "the left"... etc. Stendhal's progress of passion could be used to analyse the public rhetoric of polemicists of all stripes, and the process by which groups of people are induced to dehumanize other groups of people.

TERESA OF AVILA'S INTERIOR CASTLE
St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) is one of the great psychologists of the mystical experience, and many of her writings strive for the clearest possible description of them. A notable example of this is her _Interior Castle_: a text where she explains the process of loving God using a spatial metaphor - the metaphor of a journey through a great castle containing many "mansions" (rooms). In this work, she develops seven basic stages of the progress of the devotee's soul towards the beloved God.

(This, by the way, would be a really good way to get around writer's block for some dramatists - for writers with more of a structural/overview sense of design, rather than an event-by-event/act-consquence-act timeflow sense of design. If you find the Aristotelian-arc metaphor unhelpful, or if Robert McKee's Neo-Aristotelian act-goal-gap kinds of temporal/timeline models also fail to kick-start your engine, you can design your plot spatially, as a house or as a whole kingdom that your characters will have to voyage through to reach the goal. When I was a kid, before computers were common, we used to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in exactly this way. The Dungeon Master would design a world on graph paper - or hex paper for the hardcore players. There would be rumors of treasure, carried by strangers with information, shops for buying equipment, all kinds of hazards and obstacles to overcome along the journey, antagonists of increasing power, experience points gained by the players, etc... This spatial, Advanced D&D metaphor for plot design is a great way for spatially-minded dramatists to organize their plots... and this little rant was inspired by St. Teresa of Avila, so it can't be Satanic mind-control being channeled by Gary Gygax!!)

Teresa's model of devotional love is outlined below, with Stendhal's stages appended in square brackets, to explore the parallels.

STAGE 1: ENTERING THE CASTLE
The individual makes a decision to love God.
[S1: ADMIRATION - the accumulation of reasons to cathect to an object.]

STAGE 2: OPENING THE SELF
One prays to God and offers oneself to Him, if He should deign to accept, or not (one devotes oneself without holding out for recognition).
[S2: ANTICIPATION - An elaboration of one's focus on the beloved, and a sense of possible futures with him/her.]

STAGE 3: EMBODYING DEVOTION
Living an exemplary life of prayer and good works, defined throughout as an offering to Him.
[S3: HOPE - One begins to believe that a life with the beloved is possible.]

STAGE 4: ON GOD's HOOK
This is done through the Prayer of Recollection and the Prayer of Quiet. The Prayer of Recollection involves the active awareness of all of one's activities, and the growing realization that all of them are concentrated upon God. The Prayer of Quiet is the inward-focusing twin of the Prayer of Recollection. The Prayer of Quiet involves withdrawing inwards, with one's will totally concentrated on God, giving rise to the awareness that the soul is powerless to do anything else but serve God - nothing else is possible for the self.
[S4: ROMANTIC ATTRACTION - Admiration, anticipation and hope together form the hook - or cupid's arrow - "romantic attraction", or a "crush".]

STAGE 5: BETROTHAL - THE PROMISE OF UNION
Brief glimpses of God's perfection are permitted, in contemplative "absences" when all awareness of world and self melt away. One develops a sense of what it will mean to be fully given over to union with the divine. One has entered the penumbra of the divine presence, and one feels humility of place.[
S5: CRYSTALIZATION - The "deification of a charming object", "...an increasingly tight, closing system in which the world contracts to the beloved and the beloved fills all the world. The beloved becomes joy and beauty incarnate." <==Actually, all of Teresa's Stages 1-4 could be described as stages of crystallization...]

STAGE 6: BEING GRANTED INTIMACY WITH GOD
One enters the divine presence, enjoying experiences of rapture, transport and the famous Teresaen "wounding of the soul" - God's angel brandishing an iron-tipped spear with a flaming head, repeatedly piercing her heart and guts, causing her unimaginably ecstatically pleasurable agony... ahem... rapture and transport are altered states of consciousness, trance-like states wherein visions or revelations may be experienced. At this point, one is a full journeyman in the "God" business...
[S6: DOUBT - a threat or rival appears... the parallelism with Stendhal here is a parallelism of precise opposition. Teresa posits full confirmation at the point where Stendhal puts it into doubt. This would support the tactic - described below - of using Stendhal's progress as template for the beginning of act two, and Teresa's as a template for the latter part.]

STAGE 7: THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE
One is accepted by God in a permanent union. One is given over to God, one become's God's.
[S7: SECOND CRYSTALIZATION Full-blown obsession. The beloved is everything, coincidence and chance vanish. Everything that happens is "destiny", All other concerns and interests in life fade into nothingness. <== This sounds a bit like Teresa's Stage 4: On God's Hook.]

The parallels between Teresa's account of devotional love and Stendhal's theory of passionate love are suggestive, though not perfect. Passion and devotion intersect in each, but it is a matter of determining which comes first. The first form of love will frame or support the other. For Teresa, devotion comes first - the conscious choice to dedicate oneself. This produces passion in the end, as a kind of reward for devotion. Stendhal describes passion as coming first, and devotion (more accurately, obsession) then develops.

Passion is not willed in Stendhal's model. Rather it develops as an instance of what some psychologists describe as "elaborated intrusion". Due to some kind of subconscious (subcortical?) evaluation, a thought, image, name, memory, whatever, has enough valence or salience that it continually "pops up" in the minds, intruding on other thoughts upon the flimsiest of associative pretexts (or for no reason at all...). The active thought won't go away, and so it gets elaborated into further associations, further hypothetical action plans, further hypothetical scenarios... all of which increase the valence and salience of the intrusive thought...

Teresa's devotional love begins with a decision to love with no guarantee of reciprocation... so it has a very different, and much firmer, basis than elaborated intrusion. Elaborated intrusion does appear in Teresa's model, but it is cultivated through devotional effort - it is attained through practice - rather than appearing gratis courtesy of the subconscious. (In her *model*, anyhow. Those who psychoanalyse her writings do comment on the visceral/limbic "kick" she seems to have going for this "God" fellow!)

Maybe, as suggested earlier, in terms of a dramatic arc, if the development of passion takes us to the first major reveral of the second act, the devotional phase follows upon it as the struggle for redemption and the attainment of the beloved (be it a person, thing, achievement, state-of-being or state-of-affairs sought). This would carry us throught the second act. Once the one who is captivated is in danger of losing it all (Stendhal)... then... he/she *devotes* him/herself to achieving/deserving the passion again (Teresa).

Taking each progress of passion as its own arc, one can characterise them in various ways. Stendhal's begins with a patientive moment that revs up the motivational engine to spur a character to agency. It is an awakening of agency. That in itself is a drama. On a plot level it is a truncated version of a full three-act romantic master plot (e.g. the master-plot "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" would be shortened to "boy meets girl, boy los..."). By truncating the romantic master-plot, however, a well-loved genre of character-drama emerges - the "awakening/rejuvenation of the spirit by precarious desire." We get to see a shut-down, patientive character slowly deconstructed by passion, and awkwardly reconstructed into an agent with some chance of success. The whole drama of a person overcoming his/her own limitations can be very compelling.

These kinds of truncated-master-plot-character-dramas make great calendar-house/atrs-cable-station films.

The Teresean arc is an arc of devotion, dedication, ultimately of submission - as are most acts of religious devotion. Teresa begins as a strong-will agentive character, who goes about the process of stilling herself and bringing herself into alignment and under the guidance of an agency bigger than herself. A lot of social-conscience drama, addiction-recovery drama, escaping-the-ghetto drama and so on involve this kind of disciplined realignment under a new logic for the promise of a greater future as part of something else...

Another way to contrast the two arcs is to describe Stendhal's progress as the progress of Eros, and Teresa's as the progress towards Storge. In John Alan Lee's article on "Love Styles" (from the same awesome collection of articles as Brehm's artcle on Stendhal and Teresa: The Psychology of Love" edited by Robert J. Sterberg and Michael L. Barnes, Yale U Press, 1988) he describes Storge (Stor-Gay) as follows (fall-owes):

Typical storgic lovers often grew up in large, supportive families, or in stable, friendly communities. They enjoy their friends and are satisfied with life. They expect love will be a special friendship in which more than the usual time and activities are shared. No particular body type is strongly preferred. Storgic lovers are not anxious or preoccupied with an absent beloved. "Time will tell" whether they were meant to be together. They recoil from an excessive show of emotion in the partner, and prefer to talk about interests they share rather than about their feelings for each other. As the partnership matures, they become possessive in a quiet way unless a real threat to the relationship occurs, forcing them to declare stronger feelings. It's important to get to know the partner first as a friend before getting into sexual relations. Once deep friendship is secured, sexual problems can be "worked out". Mutual love is not a goal of life itself, but as an aspect of the greater goals of friendship and family.

The goal of Teresa's arc is the marriage, the settling or establishing of the loving relationship that will become the quiet, humble, background basis and support for a holy life. There is passion, but it is one-sided, and it quiets itself as one's position beside the beloved becomes defined. The slow development of companionate/storgic love is a great "weepy" story arc, particularly when it is non-sexual and develops within an odd-pairing, like an old man and a little boy. If their growing importance to each other is developed slowly, strongly and casually enough, then when you finally hit that moment where an unusual threat makes one of them act or speak out their dedication to the other - guaranteed waterworks!! (But like music or comedy, timing is everything.)

Like now, for instance... it's time I got back to work. Of course, I have been working on all of this love and drama stuff, but it's not what I get paid to do. As I have reflected in earlier posts... it is almost always more fun to do what you are not paid to do. Sigh...

May the Foley be with You

2006-10-30T08:00:00.002-05:00

Still liking this book on sound design by Joseph Cancellero. So much to Clavin out on! Here's a list of interesting facts that should be in every Clavinesque repertoire: the sound effects designs for Star Wars!

R2D2
50/50 electronic sounds combined with vocalizations, waterpipes and whistles, all processed and orchestrated together.

IMPERIAL WALKERS
A machinist's puch press along with the sounds of bicycle chains dropping on cement.

LIGHT SABERS
An old TV set turning on and off (and running) mixed with the hum of a 35-mm film projector.

LASER BLASTS
A hammer hitting the high-tension wires of a radio tower.

TIEFIGHTERS
An elephant's bellow, mulched and mixed in various ways.

SPEEDER BIKE
Sounds from a P-5 Mustang airplane and a P-38 Lockheed Interceptor, combined and mixed.

LUKE'S LANDSPEEDER
The sound of the Los Angeles Harbor Freeway recorded through a vacuum cleaner pipe.

CHEWBACCA
Animal sounds combined together, with a focus on walruses.

EWOK LANGUAGE
combination of Tibetan, Mongolian and Nepali.

Harmonic intervals and emotional characteristics

2006-10-27T08:38:00.002-04:00

Okay, I almost gave up on this whole blogging concept, but this is just way too cool! It's a list of different harmonic intervals and the emotional responses we have to them. This is taken from _Exploring Sound Design for Interactive Media_ by Joseph Cancellaro (Thompson 2006). Here it is:

INTERVAL-------- EMOTIONAL QUALITY
Perfect octave----- Completeness, Openness, unity
Major seventh -----Spooky, eerie, off-centre, strange
Minor seventh----- Expectant, suspenseful, full but unbalanced
Major sixth---------Peaceful, balanced
Minor sixth---------A bit sad, soothing
Perfect fifth---------Power, centering, strength, victory
Tritone-------------Horror, terrifying, scary
Perfect fourth-------Ethereal, lightness, transparent, clarity
Major third---------Neutral, hopeful, resolved, nonabrasive
Minor third---------Uplifting, relaxed, positive feelings
Major second-------Unresolved, unsettled, unpredictability
Minor second-------Unclear, tense, anxious, uneasiness
Perfect unison------Peace, strength, calmness, security

There you go! You always knew different intervals had different emotional qualities. It just took someone to actually list them! Thanks Joseph!

Random, Senseless Larkinization

2006-09-07T10:27:00.003-04:00

SKIN

Obedient daily dress
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface
You must learn your lines --
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that I
Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion changes.

- Philip Larkin

I'm not a huge reader of poetry, but I love this one by Philip Larkin. There isn't one thing I don't like about it. I love how he grabs or hooks us right off the top with a concept that is personally intimate - skin, and how he then immediately displaces it to a metaphor that contains the entire poem. I love the strange-making/dishabituation/alienating effect I experience by considering my skin to be clothing, taking something I identify with as utterly personal and then alienating it to a category of things that are optionally personal, and most importantly, only temporarily containers for identity. I love his characterization of the passage of time, as well as the notion that the core attributes of who we are - the morally responsible agent - is somehow independent of that passage.

What is that agency? It reads like the accumulated wisdom of a life. This is a retrospective poem, looking over a life lived, and over a self inhabited. The moral agent is able to apologise to its own skin for not having animated the skin in a lively enough fashion during its youth.

Death as a change of fashion? Interesting thought. Fashions fade when they no longer make the statement in the present that they did in the past. New fashions brashly trumpet new ways of presenting the self that have energy and capture the imagination. Is that why death is necessary? From a cultural perspective, is death and the passage of generations what gives life its character? The answer may be kind of obvious. Its countervailing proposition would be about the importance of continuity and tradition across generations, which many would favour as the key point to understand about generations - the transfer of accumulated wisdom to youth.

This poem does not explore this proposition in its text, but of course it does by its very existence as something written, which makes it able to transcend the death of its author, as Derrida would have emphasized. As writing, it descends to us from those who have come before. So do we attend more to its message or its operation?

Cool poem, anyhow.

When you Hate the Job you Always Wanted

2006-08-30T15:13:00.004-04:00

Okay, I finally found that article I was looking for in the first ever post to this blog. It's Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science Volume 15—Number 11: 787-793. They wanted to see how compensation effected the effort people put into a task. Standard economic wisdom suggests that they more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.

Their proposal is that there are two kinds of markets: monetary markets and social markets. Different kinds of goods and services may be associated with each market, but more to the point, the form of compensation offered differs as well. When you offer to pay someone, you signal that you want to situate the transaction in the economic modality. If you offer to pay friends for helping you move apartments, they may get royally and truly offended! However, stocking your new fridge full of beer and ordering in pizzas will be gladly accepted - unless you mention the price! If you do that, you are trying to put a money-value on the asset of having friends who will help you. You will, in a sense, be rejecting them from the social market, driven by reciprocal altruism, esteem, social standing/reputation, social network position, and all the rest.

They continue:

[This h]ypothesis...1 also predicts a distinction between exchanges in which payment is not mentioned (‘‘not paying at all’’) and those in which individuals are told explicitly that they will not be paid (‘‘paying nothing’’). Whereas not mentioning payment is likely to cause individuals to consider themselves to be in a social-market relationship, telling individuals explicitly that they are not getting paid is likely to cause them to consider themselves to be in a money-market relationship. Our framework predicts that not paying at all in the context of social market relationships can create higher levels of incentives than low levels of compensation in the context of money-market relationships, a prediction that is shared by many other accounts (Bem, 1965; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000b; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).

This means, they point out, that "Effort in exchange for no payment can be higher than effort in exchange for low monetary payment." Strictly economic rationality would not predict this, but strictly economic rationality has been slow to pick up on the impact of social exchange behavior on economic exchange behavior. I remember when I was in Fiji for awhile, and in some of the marketplaces where native Fijian businesses were predominant, there were signs all over the place telling vendors not to sell good on verbal credit! (I.e., a vague promise to repay the vendor later, somehow.) In the traditional Fijian village economy, the social exchange market dominates material exchange, and so a lot of the culture gives expression to social exchange values. In a modern cash economy, however, people had to learn to insist that business be business, and that payment be made.

I think some of us are biologically more sensitive to different kinds of signals of gain or loss. I for one basically don't notice money, don't think of it, would rather not think of it, etc. I care what my salary is, but mainly as an indicator of social status, and of how valuable my employer considers me as a resource. I love doing a good job, though. I love the recognition that comes from it, but I would far rather professionalize my work. I prefer to make my salary a background indicator of my social standing and status, and to then ignore it. When I do good work, I want it to be for intrinsic reasons - because I value good work, and because I have a will to constantly improve things, etc. I want to present my work to others, to discuss it with them, to gain recognition and to thereby gain social sanction to continue my apparently valuable work. However, getting paid for every product I deliver is profoundly de-motivating. I'd almost rather not work at all.

Weird but true.

Problems upon problems

2006-08-25T20:50:00.002-04:00

So I'm designing an online course for some clients of mine, and I have a problem. The course is boring! I am boring myself while writing this course, God only knows how boring the poor students might find it. This won't do. I have to re-think my design plan.

There is a lot of buzz about using narrative principles to structure courses, so I surf around the web and my design library at home. Here is what I figured out.

We very commonly design courses within an overall "problem-solution" pattern. We describe some problem in the world that our students will face, and present the knowledge to be gained by the course as the solution.

I think a simple problem-solution frame is too simplistic to hook and engage the narrative imagination of students (or anyone else for that matter). There is no suspense. The solution is too pat. Too near at hand.

You start to draw on the appeal of narrative by making a very simple shift in your design plan. You heap problems on top of problems at the top-level of the design plan (sub-problems don't count, they have to be top-level).

For example, I was just designing a course for an online MBA program. The topic was organizational lifecycle analysis. My initial problem-solution frame went as follows:

No single management approach is good for all situations. The top management priorities for one firm might be very low on the list for another firm. Furthermore, within any organization, there is a multitude of different units, teams, projects, intiatives and so on, all of which may require different things from managers. The question, "How will you know what to do in each situation?" Organizational lifecycle analysis can help, in these various and sundry ways...

Basic problem-solution, not very dramatic. But wait!

Once you complicate, frustrate, or oppose this solution, making it impossible to attain the result right away, then your course plan starts to exhibit some drama!

...However, just knowing about lifecycle analysis is not enough. There are all kinds of barriers, structural and cultural, that can prevent you from bringing lifecycle problems to the attention of the management team, and further barriers that can prevent you from implementing solutions to lifecycle problems...

Gasp! The goal is in jeopardy! We have entered the drama zone.

For this reason, we will also study tools for overcoming these barriers, to solve lifecycle problems and improve communication on the management team, so that in the future you will be able to anticipate such problems and prepare for them, driving organizational change instead of letting it drive you.

I think that compounding problems on top of problems like this, of holding out a goal but then raising doubts about our ability to reach it, these create more complex problems that are more engaging, more story-like. They are complex enough to hold learner interest. Simple problem-solution design frames, I think, are too simplistic. The sales job they do is too blatant and too on-the-nose. More complex, story-like design frames with some risk and some challenge are much better choices - especially for online education, when the risk of having students drop out is so high.

Hegel goes to Hollywood

2006-08-23T09:03:00.001-04:00

I've been reading Derrida's Glas (don't ask me why), and it gave me a striking idea about Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. (Now there's a topic with universal appeal... the comments section is going to explode with people chiming in on this one. The horror! The madness! The Hegelians!!!)

ahem.

[Making another parenthetical remark, Hegel actually went through three different titles for the book we call Phenomenology of the Spirit/Phenomenology of the Mind. The original title of his book was Science of the Experience of Consciousness.

This is by far and away the best title for this book, I think. However, he changed the name to Science of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Tom Rockmore, whose book Cognition:An introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is my source for all this, points out that he probably made the switch in names when he was writing the preface.

This is extraordinarily interesting, I think. The initial title is more of a first-person-experiential title, since the experience of consciousness is something We each experience as individuals. The final title is more of a third-person-observer title, reporting on the things that Spirit/Mind experiences. There is a shift from interiority to exteriority that may coincide with Hegel shift from writing the "actual" work to writing the preface "outside" the work.

Rockmore's book is way cool and is on my Amazon Wish List (all rich patrons please search for Neil LaChapelle to find my list!).]

AAANNNYhow...

I got to thinking that one could read the Phenomenology of the Spirit as a theory of story. It would describe a story arc that would begin in a self-unaware state, a patientive state rather than an agentive one, but one where some catalyst (e.g. the obligation imposed by a gift) forces the protagonist to evolve towards greater and greater self-awareness through a series of conflicts. The resolution of each conflict sets the new limits which will have to be overcome in turn. It would be a Teutonic alternative to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey", one skewed more towards interior struggles of recognition.

As long as one was not too heavy-handed with this, using the Phenomenology as a guideline rather than a crutch, it might help one create character-driven dramas of self-actualization or self-mastery. Those are the pictures that earn prestige, although they don't always earn a ton of money. Still, you never know...

I'm just waiting for a book to come out called The Phenomenology of Spirit for Screenwriters. It'll go on my Amazon Wish List too. My Amazon Wish List. Did I mention that I have an Amazon Wish List? (The online store... not a list of robust females...) Search the lists for Neil LaChapelle to find it. (Rich patrons need a lot of encouragement!!)

Procrastinology

2006-08-17T19:42:00.003-04:00

I'm still kind of hooked on this 2-motivational-systems idea... I am trying to figure out the conditions that will help me be motivated to reach short-term, mundane goals. Noodling around online, I bumped into descriptions of Lacan's model of the psyche. It's a tripartite model like Freud's psychodynamic model. The three parts are the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

The Real is inexpressible in language, and since the human subject is made in language, it is lost to us. Think of Helen Keller before she had words. It is a state of being driven by primal needs. In the Imaginary register, we no longer have raw needs, but rather a demand - the demand for wholeness, and thus the demand that the other be incorporated into the self. Think of Nietzsche's master-slave dynamic, where the powerful do not even realize that they are powerful because being powerful means you get your own (ego) goals met, and you never have to think to much about why. Those in a subservient position, however, are aware (and resentful) of the actions of the powerful, and they are able to counteract that by making the powerful self-conscious of their power and its enabling conditions. I think that Lacan's demand is like this bid from the less powerful to be like the more powerful. A bid for externally-supported narcissism.

The imaginary stage is all about image, identitifications, self-image, narcissism, ego-ideals, heros and idols, etc. Romantic attraction is heavily played out in the imaginary register.

The symbolic register is all about linguistically-constructed social entities. You are who it is said that you are, in all of the recording devices of linguistic society (including the brains of other people). Extramarital affairs are good examples of a conflict involving the real and the imaginary at war with the symbolic. According to names, to laws, to the explicit social understanding of roles, and so on, person A is married to person B. Person A has no business getting sexual with person C.

It seems to me that Lacan's insights could map nicely onto MacLean's triune brain hypothesis: that the Real could involve the lower "reptilian" brain and its role in controlling motivational systems, the Imaginary could involve the intermediate "mammalian" brain - the limbic system and its richer associational control over motivation, and the Symbolic could involve the highest brain - the isocortex in its specifically human configuration.

This point of contact might let someone interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis from a neurobiological point of view begin to cross-correlate the two literatures. The results might be interesting. New findings in neuroscience will be relevant for psychoanalysis, but mappings between the two discourses are needed.

I should mention in passing that Ichak Adizes, the inventor of a business intervention methodology that I have worked with in developing online management courses for Management Vitality, also uses a tripartite scheme that could be mapped to this triune structure. This is the distinction between what is, what we want, and what should be. Management teams can get into trouble when they confuse these three evaluations, believing that what they wish were true really is true (even though it is not). This can mislead decision-making processes.

So many ways to scratch at this itch. I wonder how to understand it all...

All of this flows from my curiosity around my own procrastination, hence the title of this post. "Procrastinology" was a coinage for me, but I'm not the first. Googling this term gives me four pages of hits as of the date of writing this post (17 Aug 2006).

When Pay Ruins Everything

2006-08-15T10:36:00.002-04:00

Virgin post... what a feeling of freedom, and irrelevance! Do the two go together, I wonder? Are the relevant always burdened?

Blogging is great! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. You see, I suffer from an illness. You might have it too! Basically, my problem is my attitude towards work. My work is important to me. I like working and I like producing good output. I want to exercise my talents, and I have various kinds of writing contracts on the go that let me do just that. Those projects are actually really quite interesting - producing texts and documents that seem like fun to put together.

However...

As soon as I do this thing I enjoy (writing) for money, the project takes on all the appeal of calculating my income taxes. I just can't get motivated to do it! Rather than doing that writing task I have agreed to do for money, I goof off, doing other writing tasks (like blogging) that I feel more like doing, just for fun.

Getting paid for something you love can totally ruin the experience.

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many different investigators believe that humans have more than one motivational system, and these systems may compete in various ways.

One of these distinctions is prominent in social exchange theory (SEC). SEC distinguishes between social exchange and economic exchange. Social exchanges ares based on trust, mutual aid, the joint production of public goods, social networking and social standing. Economic exchanges are based on contracts and on the profit principle. It may be the case that some of us are much more plugged in to the social motivational system than the economic one. Sexual selection may have had a role in shaping that social motivational system, making it more developed than it might otherwise have become... Googling "social exchange theory" opens the door to this little world.

Other people define two motivational systems differently, e.g. a "hot" (emotional) and "cool" (instrumental/rational) system, or an "approach" system and a "withdraw" system. People for whom money ruins the pleasures of work may be more hot/approach types, rather than cool/withdraw types. We may have an insufficient fear of poverty, perhaps. Or perhaps the systems overlap each other differently - we don't get hot for instrumental gains, but rather for social status and networking gains, or something.

Of course, a venerable distinction in the world of motivational studies is the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Some of us may be so strong on the intrinsic motivation (e.g. high task-involvement and high control over our work) that extrinsic incentives actually ruin our motivation. In that case, managing people like us would involve surrounding us with the type of work we want to do anyway (which happens to be what our employers also want), and giving us enough money to feel important and respected (but not have that money connected to any specific task or project). Salary would be better than piecework, perhaps, for workers like us. Then we would need a social environment where we could distinguish ourselves, winning all of those social rewards (prominence, eminence, status, respect... etc.) which are the real things that motivate us...

This is exactly how the university system works, come to think of it! (Also possibly the entire country of France.)

It would be interesting to try to design or imagine a university-like company. Genetech apparently works this way: Employees don't get assignments, they get "appointments." ...Genentech awards sabbaticals to stave off burnout. To keep creativity alive, both it and Google encourage their scientists and engineers to spend fully 20% of each workweek pursuing pet projects.

Of course, blogging is pursuing a pet project, but for now I pursue it under the cloud of guilt. The shame, the shame...

I guess it's time to get back to work.