Colleagues;
I want to recommend the dialogue below for all who read. What is the probative value of a narrative? What is the probative value of a photo of demonstrator beating a policeman with a flag? Well, narrowly, if the narrative is accurate and the photo is not faked, they prove that such a thing COULD happen, because, you can plainly see, it has happened. What IS the probative value of a poem? Nothing? Then why are people sometimes convinced by them. Here, somebody is going to insert a distinction between emotion and reason. I don’t accept that distinction. n Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 11:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] Poetry Slams vs biologic Percean Logic Machine Emulator glen - Wow! I don't think I've seen such an aggressive post from Steve before! Well done! Of course, being contrarian, I'll have to take Dave's side on this one. >8^D I'm glad you enjoyed it (my aggression and your own contrarian response) <ambiguous grinny smiley face emoticon that might be genuinely placating or really a sneer or a snarl> For the TL;DR crowd: I hear you claiming that "it is Rhetoric all the way down". What do we mean by "narrative" and "persuasion" if *not* confidence building? I do believe that "persuasion" and it's hoitier-toitier aunt, "rhetoric" are about confidence building in the receiver, including when the receiver is also (or only) talking to themselves. Narrative, on the other hand needn't be weaponized gibberish. It can be an offering. "Here, let me tell you what I have seen/heard/smelled/tasted/touched" with an overlay of "and implicit in that is *my* judgement/opinion/belief about what that means to me" and "from what you know about me, from your past experience with me and with others I might remind you of, it is left to you to interpret what I've related to you here". This forum is one of the *very few* places I offer narrative with an attempt to "persuade" and I suspect if I reviewed the archives I would join you in your own self-effacing self-description for myself, as below: "I'm an idiot and failed utterly." I thought that I tried to make this assertion in the "truth, reality, & narrative" post: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/truth-reality-amp-narrative-tc7600012.html But re-reading it shows that if that was my intention, I'm an idiot and failed utterly. The only purpose, EVER, to story telling is to *trick* the audience into believing something they wouldn't ordinarily believe ... to *pull* them along with your rhetoric. I think this is a motivated, if cynical view. If you only tell stories with this intention, then I can understand that might be why you believe that is all anyone else might intend. The best stories, especially those laced with imagery, and built as an iterated game of storytelling around a campfire or pub table with a brew in every fist, and are ultimately a group exploration of either new territories, or familiar territories with a new perspectives. I often believe that is what we are (trying to) doing here with our coffee mugs around the fading memory of a table at St John's. This is why we're so susceptible to con-men like Trump (and Scott Adams). It's also why Neil deGrasse Tyson is so popular! ... and why actual engineers deliver such horrible presentations ... and why every engineer *hates* the marketing department. A startup tech company decided to have a team-building exercise, so they rented a cabin up in the hills for a weekend of male bonding (this was before women really became well represented in tech), learning to play together, learning to solve problems (can you light a fire with only wet wood and no paper or gasoline?) in a group context. As they are unloading their vehicles, the salesman for the company says "hey, you guys finish unloading and get a fire started, I'll go rustle us up something to eat!" The company is pretty new but they were all a little familiar with one another already, and the tech guys give one another a silent nod of agreement that the salesman would "just get in the way" if he actually tried to help with any of the practical stuff. Just as everything gets put in a reasonable (worse is better?) if not ideal (right-thing?) place, the salesman comes running in the wide-open front door with a bear chasing him. As he dives out the back window, he shouts... "you guys kill this and skin it, and I'll go get another one! Of course, it's plausible to distinguish between communication and story-telling. I do it all the time when I tell people how much I hate poetry. Poetry is anti-communication, but great story-telling. It relies heavily on the audience to collapse the poetic ambiguity down onto their own preferred meaning. And this is exactly what Trump does. Trump is a 1st class poet, never saying anything with any concreteness, which is why people call him a mobster and con-man. Allowing the audience to collapse whatever nonsense he said to their own meaning. This is poetry. You offer a fair line of rhetoric here to persuade me (or others more likely since I think you know I don't share this perspective and bare re-assertion of same does not persuasion yield) that we should eschew imagistic poetry,and figurative storytelling because it is not precise and in fact is deliberately ambiguous and requires (allows) the receiver to bring their own experience to the process. This leads me to the point where I claim what you call "communication" is not that at all... that there is little if any "co" in the "mmunication" of this type. What you seem to want to call co-mmunication is more well described by quality engineering design documents or a clean computer program. Yes, those are the best things to use when you are trying to build a bridge or program a computer to do something the designer actually understands well before she embarks on the process. What you often denigrate as "premature binding" seems to be what you promote here. I understand and agree that figurative and imagistic language which leaves a great deal to the receiver to bind to their own "greed and fear triggers" can be an incredibly dangerous rhetorical device, but that is not a reason to err on the side of "premature binding". Perhaps my preferred notion of "co-mmunication" is more like "co-creation" or "co-arising". And it might also explain why I rattle on here from time to time in what apparently is taken by many to be rambling tangents (aka "dookey splatter"). I think that I am offering co-mmunication elements for something more co-creative than essentially acting as a roomful of "calculators" (in the sense of Feynman's "girls" working on the Manhattan Project" working together to implement compiler and emulator for Percean Logic. So, where we stand on Trump as a Great Communicator hinges on whether we think poetry is communication or not! Ha! QED! >8^D Well (enough) crafted rhetoric, but I guess I'd rather hear a co-creative story, maybe even in poetic form, that leads us all to co-discover future states of possibility in the implied Adjacent Possibles branching out from some actual "Reality" we are in at the moment, whether it is a precise Newtonian state space or some quantum superposition of (near) parallel realities. I feel I know you well enough to believe that nearly everything you write here (or rant about in your favorite outdoor pub in Olympia) is in good faith and most of your "provocative speech" is to provoke precisely the kind of co-creative co-arising that I also seek.... Or maybe this is just a poetry slam for poetry and slamming sake? Speaking of ambiguity and late binding: When Doug muttered the infamous line "Glen, you can be such an a$$hole sometimes!" nearly a decade ago, I thought he was offering that up in praise. I believe you actually *did* get his goat that time, but knowing Doug even better than I do you, I know *he* would have taken that as an underhanded compliment if/when it was offered to him! - steve the aggressive poet On 1/11/21 7:03 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Scott Adams might have been speaking ironically? I don't have his original text. "an effective persuader in a world where facts don't matter" does not "a great communicator" make... it makes something rather different... <TR;dbttR> Being able to read a room (or individual), identify their greed and fear triggers, and then play them deftly... that is a manipulative con man, not a communicator. One who can play 74M people and incite a violent attack by many thousands of them on the seat of our government (insurrection) might have cult-leader qualities, but I'd not call them a "great communicator", I'd call it something else entirely. It isn't clear that what our "glorious leader" has done with the rest of the world leaders over the last 4 years qualifies as "great communication" either, though maybe he did effectively communicate *his* lack of respect for former allies and *his* authoritarian envy for the "success" of the likes of Putin, Erdoğan, Bolsonaro, Duterte, bin Salman, maybe even Kim Jong Un? To be clear, I don't think much about how many of Trump's followers are "deplorables" because I think of most of them as simply deluded and in his thrall, naturally the deplorable among them are merely the "ragged edged poison tip" of his spear. I'd be interested to hear what you believe Trump has been communicating to his supporters, his non-supporters, our (former) allies around the world, and our (former) all this time? And is what he's been communicating been honest in fact and in heart? DaveW did not claim Trump was a great communicator — he did (attempt to) cite Scott Adams' book, /Win Bigly,/ where Adams, who considers himself a great communicator, argued that Trump was the same and that was why he was going to win the election against Hillary — which he did. Steve adds: /"I believe it is duplicitous and divisive to claim he is "a great communicator" That implies both depth and breadth, that he is listening to a broad swath of the country and he is speaking to a broad swath."/ Adams argues, and I completely agree, that this is exactly what Trump did in 2016, does today, and will continue to do in the future. A broad enough swath to win in 2016 and attract 40 million votes in 2020. I said in 2016 (when I was also predicting Trump's win) that it was a huge mistake for Democrats and the Media then, to focus on the 1-10 percent of Trump supporters who were certifiably wacko and card carrying members of the "Basket of Deplorables," and pretending the 90-99% did not exist and did not have legitimate and perhaps even reasonable reasons for supporting someone — for policy and philosophical reasons — that they found to be despicable as a person. In this post, I believe SteveS is perpetuating that mistake. While ranting, may I remark that the social media and tech platforms essentially removed themselves from rule 230 protection (when it gets to the courts) by banning Trump and Parler. Modifying 230 is a bipartisan objective, but it will be real interesting to watch the rhetorical contortions the Dems will have to perform when considering actual legislation. davew On Sun, Jan 10, 2021, at 10:57 AM, Steve Smith wrote: I didn't take the bait on Friday's vFriam when DaveW (as I remember) claimed that Donald J Trump was "a great communicator". (same as Reagan was credited by his fans and perhaps more reluctantly his detractors?) I suppose Trump is very effective at one mode of transmission of his ugliest sentiments, which I find to be at best a very degenerate form of CO mmunication. Whatever skills he has for "reading a crowd" and reflecting back that which serves his purposes feels more like Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) than "communication". I believe it is duplicitous and divisive to claim he is "a great communicator" That implies both depth and breadth, that he is listening to a broad swath of the country and he is speaking to a broad swath. Perhaps by a twist of interpretation, you *can* claim that he has his finger on the pulse of those he whips into a seditious and insurrectional frenzy as well as those he cannot so instead whips into what has been called "Trump Derangement Syndrome" (TDS). His apparent ability to instigate TDS in virtually everyone (type A or type B) is somewhat unique... though authoritarian figures around the world have done it for millennia? One (DaveW?) could also argue his sublime ability to give clear direction/orders to his underlings (e.g. Michael Cohen, et al) without ever actually saying anything indictable. This is the stuff of Crime bosses, right? Very effective communicators within a very narrow (and useful to them) context. DaveW's assertion on Friday provided me the perspective and motivation to look a little deeper into the question of just what makes Trump's style of communication so dangerous. The previous post with the Politico article about Sedition vs Insurrection came to me from that unconsciously I think.
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