Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Talking with Folk Who Hate You

Workload combined with preoccupation over a family medical issue (everything's fine thanks, no need for concern) will probably wipe out the week.

Given this, I'll direct you to a fine series of essays written by Sara Robinson over at David Neiwert's joint. Sara, a former fundamentalist Christian, examines the social and psychological underpinnings of fundamentalist society at large, extends into authoritarianism, and then ties it all up in integrating ways to effectively communicate with people who are predisposed to not just disagree with you, but consider debate weakness. Ways of communicating honestly and openly, but keeping in mind the different ways different social structures view language and culture.

I think this series of essays is not just a wonderful tool in public discourse, but might also be helpful for some readers having intra-family issues. And setting aside domestic politics -- this is also the sort of discussion we should be having about our cultural warfare component in the struggle against Islamic Fundamentalism.

Cracks in the Wall I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality
Cracks in the Wall II: Listening to the Leavers
Cracks in the Wall III: Escape Ladders
Tunnels & Bridges I: Divide and Conquer
Tunnels & Bridges II: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself
Tunnels & Bridges III: A Bigger World

I belive she's got a bit more to come. This follow-up post is important, as it nails down what I was trying to say in "Ain't" although notwhere nearly as well as Sara does:

Stereotypes, Sellouts, and Winning the Meme Wars

There have been a recent rash of books out about framing and language debates, and my main point stands -- once you have been defined as "Other", nothing you say will make any difference. We have to dig in and start taking language theory seriously in the comming decades. In a nation where just under half of the citizens believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 -- despite the President recently publicly and repeatedly admitting there was no such connection -- we're past message control. We're into hard-wiring.

It seems a good moment to address a personal deficiency. An astute reader of this blog recently e-mailed me, basically pointing out:"For the guy who wrote 'Ain't", you're awfully confrontational about, say evolution." He's right --I'm awfully confrontational about a lot of things, despite preaching a "common ground" linguistic approach.

Some of it's a straight-out character flaw. Mark Waid will sometimes shake his head at me going off on a commenter --"Why, why do you poke the bear?" The problem is, I still have a lot of gut instinct left over from my stand-up days. You do not "reach common ground" with a heckler -- you destroy a heckler, or anyone else who threatens the fragile emotional suspension required in a successful stand-up show. Destroy them, or suffer the consequences. A thousand people's night will go wrong based on one person's selfishness or idiocy -- and your failure to control same on a split-second's notice. (Huh, actually one could argue that there are elements of authoritarian behaviour in a stand-up performance. Situational microcosm. Interesting.)

Part of it's my physics training. As one scientist I know put the discussion between evolution and ID -- "Its not science vs. faith. It's science vs. crap." One of the truly wonderful things about science is that it's open source -- no matter who you are, if you can back up your hypothesis with successful experimentation, you win. Simply put -- intelligent design is just not bad science, it's not even science. (Here's the best, clearest explanation I know of the difference, the one I wind up sending everyone when this comes up). The current argument about evolution is occurring only because ID proponents are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't know how the scientific method works. They are undermining the scientific method. To me, that's like selfishly breaking the tool that allows anyone with enough intelligence and resolve to change the world. I can see reasonable people disagreeing about abortion, God, gay marriage in society, the best anti-poverty initiatives, strategies and tactics in the GWoT -- but 2+2=4, and as soon as it doesn't, these people have destroyed something that most of us have no idea is so beyond price. And we will only miss it when it is too late.

But that same love of the scientific method is why I try -- often poorly -- to approach communication in a methodical way. We've already joked about how I parsed out joke structure compulsively back when I performed. So I'm always caught, the physicist in me trying to construct finer and finer instruments with which to better understand our communications, and to hone them -- and the the stand-up in me, ready to start bashing in brains with those delicate tools wielded like a bleached thigh-bone. Please forgive me the odd hoot and snarl.

58 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, honey, the odd hoot and snarl is why I married you. Now come home and we'll watch some terrifically bad horror movies and get through this just fine. But for the love of all that is holy, nothing with Tara Reid in it - I couldn't bear that again.

Unknown said...

In the name of God, she can't even WALK convincingly. How does somebody WALK badly?

Unknown said...

It's called "drugs".

Anonymous said...

Reading this reminded me of something uttered by Archie Bunker years and years ago on All in the Family... "It ain't supposed to make sense; it's faith. Faith is something that you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe."

The Minstrel Boy said...

it takes me back to the exhange between cleavon little and gene wilder in blazing saddles
KID:
don't be too hard them, these are people of the earth, simple people. you know, morons.

i agree with a total nuclear war no prisoners public and humiliating execution policy with hecklers. i've seen them kill many a performance. i've seen some of the old vegas masters like jackie vernon handle them and it's almost like a corrida. you know there's going to be blood on the sand, but it can also be beautiful. i must say, however, belzer was the best destoyer of hecklers i've ever seen. he has enough of a mean strak that he almost baits them into taking a stab at it and then . . .oh my.

Anonymous said...

Good luck reaching across the divide with Sara's comically distorted intel on those weird folks in red-state land.

To raise just one point, if the "right-wing authoritarian followers" she describes "accept almost without question the statements and actions of established authorities, and comply with such instructions without further ado", why didn't they rally behind Clinton? As established authorities go, the POTUS ranks pretty high on the list, no?

Why, if I didn't know better, I'd say it looks like Sara's "followers" are making decisions about who to support — almost like real human beings!

Try harder.

Anonymous said...

Ah, wading through the tripe, I find the answer to why "right-wing authoritarian followers" didn't like Clinton:

...authoritarian followers voluntarily choose their leaders, usually on the basis of how strongly those leaders support the follower's belief system. Cultural or political leaders who don't support the belief system (for example, federal court judges, scientists, progressive celebrities) are seen as illegitimate authorities, and become targets of followers' aggression.

Of course, this is totally different from liberals saying that Bush is "not my president", or that he was illegitimately elected.

Almost all of Sara's screed could be similarly flipped around to describe folks on the other side of the aisle.

Greg said...

Rogers, man, I feel your pain on the page count--trying to finish a new play for workshop out here in Iowa.
Up to page 76.
I was hoping, though, if you've got the time, and being the wired-in paid writer you are, you might have thoughts on ABC's atrocious, dishonest, upcoming "Path to 9/11," and how to respond to it.

Anonymous said...

Gaijin Biker, perhaps Sara's thesis isn't quite perfect. However, there is one small datum left out of your posts that points to why people try to come up with theories as to why at least 36% of the US electorate still supports Bush.

Umm, its because he's really, really bad at being president.

p.s. As much as I disagree with some of Bill Clinton's policies and the whole DLC wing of the Democratic party ... you might be more succesful at criticizing Sara's post if you didn't use Clinton as a comparison to Bush. That's like bringing a knife to a gun fight (when you are trying to determine why people would choose to follow Bill over Dubya anyway).

Xactiphyn said...

Simply put -- intelligent design is just not bad science, it's not even science.

I agree with you 99% -- but of course it is the remaining 1% that is interesting to talk about. I think that concept of Irreducible Complexity (IC) is a falsifiable, scientific hypothesis. I know most biologists disagree with this, but then most of them turn around and point out how IC isn't true. If they can falsify it, doesn't that make it falsifiable?

While I'm not convinced IC has been falsified within the biological arena, it has been proven false with genetic algorithms.

But my main point is the hypothesis of Irreducible Complexity has actually added to the intellectual discourse of evolution. How evolution simultaneously produces interactive components is an interesting thought and evolutionary biologists now look for examples of it.

I'd like to see more hypotheses like this from the ID community. I 'have faith' they will all be shot down, but they can add to the scientific conversation.

Anonymous said...

Some people need to be hooted and snarled at. All this "civil discourse" nonsense is just that - nonsense. When right-wingers stop killing and maiming gays, denying them their rights, trying to take away women's rights to their own bodies, and pushing their mind-boggling limited world view onto other people's children, we'll shut up.

Anonymous said...

Mark:

As I understand it, the theory of irreducible complexity is not falsifiable. It basically states that at a certain (undefined) level of complexity, scientists cannot understand how the individual parts of the system could have evolved seperately.

It generally bases that statement on the concept that complex systems always evolve from less complex systems that performed the same function less efficiently (this assumption is provably false).

As supporting evidence it tries to provide complex biological systems that it believes could not have functioned without all of their current parts and so they believe would have had to evolve at one time as a single unit, such as the eye. (This is also provably false.)

So while the evidence they claim supports the theory is falsifiable, as is the premise that the theory is based upon, the theory itself is not. Most notably because they have never been able to come up with a measurable concept of how complex a system would have to be before it could not have evolved which would allow them to predict, in advance, biological structures which could not have evolved, and could then be tested against known biological evidence. Instead, they always take examples of biological structures we do not know the evolutionary history of and claim that the uncertainty is evidence that they could not have. This forces scientists to refute each individual example of a complex structure that ID claims could not have evolved naturally rather than being able to address the underlying validity of the theory itself.

Xactiphyn said...

Most notably because they have never been able to come up with a measurable concept of how complex a system would have to be before it could not have evolved which would allow them to predict, in advance, biological structures which could not have evolved, and could then be tested against known biological evidence.

I'll give you that, but the same thing happens in 'real' science as a theory matures; there was a reason why I used the word 'hypothesis' instead of theory. If there was evidence that the high end of complexity has evolutionary problems then one could use observation and evidence to try to determine where the line dividing potential evolution and required design lies.

Of course, there is no evidence for this. Near as we can tell there is no level of complexity evolution can't obtain. Thus, the hypothesis will never mature into a solid scientific theory. But the reason isn't because the hypothesis isn't scientific, it is because the hypothesis isn't supported by the evidence.

But I think it is very good scientists are looking for this kind of evolved complexity. I believe it adds to our understanding of the natural world and, ironically, our sheer awe at the power and 'intelligence' of the evolutionary model.

---

Oh, I finally read the linked pages last night. They are very good. But the page they link to, Red Family, Blue Family is probably the best I've ever read at understanding the heart and mind of social conservatives. If you read one thing, read that.

John Seavey said...

And, of course, both ID and Gaijin Biker provide examples of the problem the right-wing seems to have with the concept of "being reasonable"...the idea that being reasonable means you have to accept their unreasonable ideas because they're willing to consider yours.

When people call ID "crap", they're not doing so because they refuse to listen to it. They're doing it because they have listened to it, have weighed the evidence, and have found it to be without validity. It isn't "reason" to reconsider the same bad idea again and again just because someone else still believes it--it's futility.

Likewise, when people raise questions about Bush as a President, they do so on factual grounds--his record as a President is not a good one, and there's just no getting around it. I'm not going to disregard factual evidence just to make you feel like I'm considering your point of view--I have considered it, it is bullshit, and we are moving on. You don't get to hold opinions contrary to facts just because you like them.

This is, of course, why conservatives don't like facts. Reality has a noted liberal bias. :)

Anonymous said...

I am reminded of this one comedian (can't remember his name) who had a bit about being at a club and Osama Bin Laden was there, heckling him. He went on to say "he had this headgear on because he apparently has a bit of an overbite, and... I can't even understand the heckles!" It was hilarious.

Oh, and love the links about how to talk with froth-at-the-mouth conservatives.

E in Atlanta said...

Oh, wow. For years I've Myers-Briggsed, tried to analyse my learning style, been to at least a dozen communication seminars. But your blog entry hit my problems right on the head; I'm too much of a scientist.

You should write a book!

Anonymous said...

I think that concept of Irreducible Complexity (IC) is a falsifiable, scientific hypothesis.

Not exactly. It's got three immediate problems:

First, it makes no specific predictions.

Second, when you apply it to make a specific prediction, you're arguing from ignorance: You're arguing that, because you don't know how something could have formed naturally, that it could not have formed naturally.

Third, Michael Behe's version of it has an absolutely crippling flaw - it considers something irreducibly complex if and only if it cannot be formed by successive incremental additive changes all showing an improvement in the function of the final result. I'll leave pointing out the obvious issues there to the observer.

In order for Irreducible Complexity to be a useful hypothesis, you need to prove one of two things: That something *could not* have formed by successive mutation, or that something *did not* form by successive mutation.

And as soon as there's an example of either of those that stands up for even a second, there'll be Nobel prizes awarded.

Anonymous said...

what bin Laden has said has been crystal clear.

"We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel." -Osama bin Laden, October 2001

"... the Mujahideen saw the black gang of thugs in the White House hiding the truth, and their stupid and foolish leader, who is elected and supported by his people, denying reality and proclaiming that we (the Mujahideen) were striking them because we were jealous of them (the Americans), whereas the reality is that we are striking them because of their evil and injustice in the whole of the Islamic World, especially in Iraq and Palestine and their occupation of the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries." -Osama Bin Laden , February 14 , 2003

Datapoint: This is the first time I've seen those quotes, or heard talk focused on that specific a motive.

Anonymous said...

XKCD
pretty much summed up my thoughts on the whole ID/evolution debate. Among other things.

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