[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm pretty sure that they knew I was joking, my friend. ;-)

I do too, but I've found it best to be very clear about such things.

It doesn't just enable it--it encourages it. Rude behavior has now replaced any pretense at listening to someone, because, god forbid, you might learn something or hear something that doesn't jive with your beliefs. We all see how the unintended consequence of that behavior is playing out at universities, unfortunately.

Yes, we are. One recent volume I've seen worries that free speech is endangered, because the society we live in increasingly worries about giving offense, and anything that might upset someone else simply should not be said.

Don't get me started on that one. If one more person says "you shouldn't charge to make EDITS! It only takes one minute to open a file and make a change," I may go down for murder.

All you can say is "I charge for my time. If it takes time, I charge for it. Edits take time. If you don't want to be charged for them properly proof your manuscript before sending it to me so I don't have to make edits."

I used to say this (more or less) to my associates--that we were all spoiled. That we'd been very lucky, that all the people we dealt with, building hotels, etc., were incredibly smart and good at what they do. That our entire "universe" was populated with top performers and so forth. That the flipside to that is--you're ill-prepared for reality, when it hits.

I wasn't, and I too was largely insulated. There's a difference between understanding that some folks aren't very bright, and dealing with them when you encounter them.

Yes, that's true, in self-pubbing, I suspect largely due to the whole 'dream' thing. Right? Everybody wants to be the next Dan Brown, the next Stephenie Meyer, etc. And, bygod, their novel is IT. It's the next brilliant as-yet undiscovered masterpiece, and as soon as people just READ it, the sooner that rocketship to superstardom will depart.

I'd back off a step. The folks I interact with assume they can make a living writing and self publishing, with no international best seller superstardom assumed. Getting across that without a $DEITY granted miracle, they [i]can['t], and don't give up their day job is an uphill slog I increasingly don't try to make.

But it's also true everywhere else. It's not just publishing, where people increasingly cherry-pick what information they want to hear/see. It's everything. The advent of the Net has made it VERY easy to live in an echo chamber. Where you surround yourself with people who Think Just Like You. People who won't tell you that you're wrong that the Illuminati are taking over the New Jersey Garbage Business, because they're putting special chemicals in the trash cans, that get on your hands and then into your brains. Or whatever. It doesn't even have to be far out. It's just easy, isn't it? Stick at the forums where everybody knows your name, and supports what you believe, reinforces the idea that you're right, in your beliefs....it's a seduction. Like any other type of addiction, it feeds the brain chemistry that is hard to defeat with cold hard facts.

Yes, and there has been a fair bit of informed commentary and concern about it.

We all want to be surrounded by People Like Us, and the Internet and helpful algorithms make it easier and easier to find People Like Us to be surrounded by. We become increasingly balkanized in consequence. I don't care what you believe. You can find a website out there devoted to it that will reassure you you are correct, and you can say "It's true! I read it on the Internet!"

It's a technological expansion of what was already happening in print. Whatever your view, you could find things like newspapers that supported you. And stuff in print acquired a special level of authority, simple because it was in print.

There is some kind of study--and no, I don't know where it is, now--that belief and beliefs can actually act like chemical agents on the brain. That the act of belief can cause the release of certain brain chemicals/hormones/whatever that make you feel good, like drugs. And while the study in question was addressing religious belief, what's the difference? I mean, if you believe in some type of conspiracy, and you surround yourself with other Troos, what's the diff between that and some specific religious belief? Nothing, brain-chemistry wise.

Programming forums have the concept of Religious Arguments. There are topics that are matters of gut level belief, which are not amenable to rational argument. The stuff lives on a non-rational level. In programming forums, there is at least the understanding that the underlying beliefs are non-rational, and arguing about them in the forums is a waste of everyone's time.

That extends to all manner of things, and politics is also a matter of non-rational beliefs.

One of the formative books for me was the late Eric Berne's Games People Play, which was a pop pysch bestseller in the 60's. Berne was a psychiatrist and founder of the discipline of transactional analysis. In retrospect, the best seller status was startling, because it wasn't written as pop psych. It was a technical tome aimed at other psychiatrists.

One of Berne's insights was that we all start from a Position. The Position is an unconscious, existential notion of "This is who I am, and this is how I fit into my society." The Position is inculcated early, absorbed by osmosis beginning in early childhood from the adults around us, and is adopted in basic form between the ages of 5 - 7 years old. Once we have adopted a Position, our chief goal is to defend it. We clutch to our chest evidence that supports what we believe, and ignore or reject evidence that doesn't. The Position becomes part of our "sense of self".

Positions somewhat in-congruent with reality produce behave we consider neurotic. Positions really in-congruent with reality produce behave we call psychotic. And the way the Position embeds can make the practice of psychiatry physically dangerous for the psychiatrist, because the practice of psychiatry is in part making those unconscious assumptions conscious, where they can be examined and modified. For some folks, questions of the Position are seen as attacks on their person, and produce a violent response.

I see a lot of this sort of thing, though fortunately not the violent responses. I spend a fair bit of time in online conversations trying to determine precisely what people's Positions are. "I know what you believe. I'm trying to understand why you believe it, and what makes it attractive to you."

Just...think about that for a moment. The idea that finding people who agree with us, who support our belief system, is potentially addictive. How easy it is, to find those people, on the Net, and invest in staying with them. And how that would affect the behavior of people "in real life" as they say, especially over a long period of time, over large swaths of population.

See above about balkanization.

Hitch (who finds it all a bit worrisome...)

I find it very worrisome.
______
Dennis