Pragmagic

[Adios]

I used to feel that way, until I realized it wasn't my responsibility to come up with better ideas, and I just like wrecking things.

I feel ya, destruction can be a blast, especially if your goal is to have fun.

I am also still reacting to a frustrating conversation I had last week. I was proposing a project, and one of the people I was taking to began every sentence with "Yes, but...", followed by a reason that it wouldn't work. (Part of the subtext is that the chick was in a bad mood and doesn't have a high opinion of the guy I was partnering with) She dismissed or resisted everything I was saying. I can accept that my idea might not have been gold (that's what brainstorming is for), but when you're trying to create something, it sucks your energy when you deal with people who are stuck in negation mode. Negativity infects other thoughts and can pervade one's analytic process. It's only one side of the coin.


ahh sorry to rant there, had to get that out 

Well doesn't this rant strike at the heart of your original point?

[Cramulus]

how do you mean?

[Adios]

how do you mean?

She refused to listen due to influences, and in doing so the opportunity for building a workable solution may have been missed.

Closed mindedness is a steel trap and destroys creativity.

[Cramulus]

ah yes. My bad, I had interpreted "strike at the heart of" to mean "negate". 

[Adios]

ah yes. My bad, I had interpreted "strike at the heart of" to mean "negate". 

Oh, sorry, no I meant it was reinforcing your original concept.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

I greatly enjoyed the rant, especially the shopping cart metaphor. That was brilliant.

However, I think that every choice a person makes is a pragmatic one or serves pragmatic purposes. I'd even go so far as to say that people couldn't stop being pragmatic if they tried, the human brain is too good at it.

So, what exactly do you mean by pragmatism? From who's or what criteria is something pragmatic? Could you define what wouldn't be pragmatic in the context of your rant?

I'm harping on the pragmatism due to the title of the piece and how the main thrust of the rant doesn't seem to develop it much. Also, because I find the idea quite interesting and a cornerstone in my worldview. For me, it links up with falsifiability, operationalism, E-Prime, the melioration principle, ecology of mind, Taoism, and on and on.

Your thoughts on narratives, identity and the fuzzy complexity definitely struck a chord in me though. I've been operating on those assumptions about the world for quite some time, though I haven't been able to articulate them as well as you've done here.

[Cramulus]

thanks net. 

It seems like I've been harping on rigid identities this week. I think the kernel at hte center is that paradox in the PD: "It is my firm believe that it is wrong to hold firm beliefs."

RA Wilson crystalizes this in the intro to Cosmic Trigger:

...It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

so what wouldn't be pragmatic?

Dogma, for one. Most breeds of fundamentalism.

Obama has a reputation for being a great compromiser, which is normally a great pragmatic view. But it's not working, the republicans are still filibustering and not budging on their issues. The right wing doesn't treat him as a moderate, they treat him as this crazy extremist socialist. So clearly he has to change his strategy and focus on "what works".


Another example... my girlfriend has a personality which makes it easy for some people to take advantage of her. She wants to do a good job and make people happy, so she's willing to put up with a lot of shit. So she's working at this business, which is falling apart, and they realized that she can't say no. So they made her a manager and made her responsible for a lot of stuff about the company which is failing. and now she's super stressed out because she hasn't had a day off in 60+ days and the business isn't any stronger for it.

I see this as a time when one should drop the pretenses and start telling the upper management what's really going on. She doesn't want to "make waves", but the alternative is being taken advantage of. At a certain point the amount of stress / work will be greater than her social graces, and that's when she's going to snap at them. (see: melioration principle) But if she wasn't as attached to her current narratives, that threshold would be lower. It'd be easier for her to tell off her superiors because her narrative would be about doing what works, not about placating the people in charge. And it would actually be better for the company, too.


When you ask somebody what they believe in, most people are able to respond with a neat label. "Oh I'm a democrat". "I'm a christian." etc

And the truth is that nobody aligns 100% with the position taken by their party. I had a friend a few years back who was both a democrat and a catholic, and experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance regarding abortion. On one hand, he thought that people should be able to choose, on the other hand he thought that abortion was murder. But it seems like his confusion was an issue of allegiance, not principle.