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Feb. 11th, 2020 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. The Single Reason People Can't Write
For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls "the Curse of Knowledge", which he defines as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose."
"Every human pastime --music, cooking, sports, art, theoretical physics --develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other's company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them."
People in business seem particularly prone to this "affliction." You could argue that business has developed its own entirely unique dialect of English. People are exposed to an alphabet soup of terms and acronyms at business school, which they then put into use in their day-to-day interactions once they enter the working world.
And what starts out as a means of facilitating verbal communication between people becomes the primary mode with which people communicate their ideas in writing, from email to chat apps to business proposals and presentations.
"How can we lift the curse of knowledge?" asks Pinker. "A considerate writer will...cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in 'Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,' rather than the bare 'Arabidopsis.' It's not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk."
"Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all."
Whenever I write a sentence that makes me pause and wonder about what it means, I assume that other readers might react in the same way. If a sentence is not clear to me, it might not be clear to others. It's an approach that I recommend to anyone who is trying to improve his own writing.
Good advice, a lot of it I use daily - since I basically write with the aim to persuade or communicate specific information to various disciplines and audiences.
My boss often would tell me when writing an email -- to know my audience, and would crack down on me if I didn't phrase the emails in a certain way.
I do not for example write the way I do on this journal in my job. My writing at work is formal, and precise.
2. Today's Biggest Threat is The Polarized Mind
As psychologists concerned with the social and psychological bases of human destructiveness, and as dedicated observers of history, we have arrived at the conclusion that so much of what we call human depravity (“evil”) seems to be based on a principle termed “the polarized mind.” The polarized mind is the fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view, and it has caused more human torment and misery than virtually any other factor.
As citizens of very different and sometimes clashing civilizations, the United States and Iran respectively, we also have a unique vantage point on the polarized mind. While so many theories of human destructiveness are associated with regional customs, mores and histories, we have observed the polarized mind at work in widely divergent cultural, ethnic and economic circumstances.
Moreover, we are in complete agreement that the polarized mind is one of the major threats to humanity, not just isolated parts of the world. Our empirically based studies, for example, have indicated that mindlessness—a condition of narrowed perception and reactivity—is a chief and cross-cultural feature of the polarized mind; while (Langerian) mindfulness, an attitude of heightened awareness or presence, is a cardinal feature of the depolarized mind, associated with capacity for discovery, creativity and well-being. It is also associated with a radical transformation of consciousness, but this consciousness cannot flourish until it counterbalances and, to the extent possible, supersedes the polarized mind.
What is the basis for the polarized mind? While there are many contributing factors, from family and cultural conditioning to scarcity of resources to availability of weapons to neuropsychological dispositions, the common denominators among all these factors appears to be fear and anxiety. As an array of studies has shown, people tend to become polarized—fixated and extreme—in the face of helplessness, anxiety and fear.
This condition not only tends to make people feel small and insignificant, but ultimately—if the helplessness, anxiety and fear are strong enough—as if their very lives are at stake. The result of this outcome is that people will do all they can to avoid such death anxiety, including becoming violent and oppressive themselves as a defense.
The polarized mind has thus become associated with a range of extremist behaviors from despotism to racism to xenophobia to the obsession with power and control. Such cycles are evident in history: whenever people experience individual or collective trauma, such as wars, economic collapse and personal or cultural displacement, and they are unable to acquire the psychosocial support necessary to address these upheavals, the polarized mind is likely to predominate.
Today we are faced with one of the most polarizing world situations in decades as authoritarian rule has undergone a revival, and we are faced once again with the challenge: Are we going to stick our heads in the sand and ignore the hurts and insults that have led to our divisiveness, thus perpetuating a persistent cycle of human devitalization? Or are we going to consider the findings of our hard-won psychological, spiritual and philosophical disciplines and face the wounds that beset us?
From our vantage point as investigators, there is little question that the latter course is preferable and through mindful, widespread dialogue we see an opening. There are already grassroots movements in this latter direction, and we see our personal interchanges as an aspect of those. But on a larger scale, there are growing opportunities for meaningful cross-cultural exchange and for live person-to-person encounters.
One such opportunity is a group called Better Angels, to which one of the authors of this article (Kirk Schneider) belongs. Better Angels is now active in dozens of U.S. states and has conducted hundreds of workshops. These workshops consist of structured living-room style dialogues between self-identified liberals and conservatives from a range of backgrounds and appear to be yielding promising results.
The key here is the presence or mindfulness to which we alluded earlier. To the extent that interacting parties can approach each other with openness, curiosity and respect, the greater the likelihood that they will acquire the fruit of their contacts—the ability to learn about and potentially find common ground with a formerly polarizing mind.
Hmm.
3. Interesting... HBO Limited Series based on PARASITE film
4.A Discovery of Witches is coming back for a S2 in 2020, they just don't know when in 2020.
For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls "the Curse of Knowledge", which he defines as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose."
"Every human pastime --music, cooking, sports, art, theoretical physics --develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other's company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them."
People in business seem particularly prone to this "affliction." You could argue that business has developed its own entirely unique dialect of English. People are exposed to an alphabet soup of terms and acronyms at business school, which they then put into use in their day-to-day interactions once they enter the working world.
And what starts out as a means of facilitating verbal communication between people becomes the primary mode with which people communicate their ideas in writing, from email to chat apps to business proposals and presentations.
"How can we lift the curse of knowledge?" asks Pinker. "A considerate writer will...cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in 'Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,' rather than the bare 'Arabidopsis.' It's not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk."
"Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all."
Whenever I write a sentence that makes me pause and wonder about what it means, I assume that other readers might react in the same way. If a sentence is not clear to me, it might not be clear to others. It's an approach that I recommend to anyone who is trying to improve his own writing.
Good advice, a lot of it I use daily - since I basically write with the aim to persuade or communicate specific information to various disciplines and audiences.
My boss often would tell me when writing an email -- to know my audience, and would crack down on me if I didn't phrase the emails in a certain way.
I do not for example write the way I do on this journal in my job. My writing at work is formal, and precise.
2. Today's Biggest Threat is The Polarized Mind
As psychologists concerned with the social and psychological bases of human destructiveness, and as dedicated observers of history, we have arrived at the conclusion that so much of what we call human depravity (“evil”) seems to be based on a principle termed “the polarized mind.” The polarized mind is the fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view, and it has caused more human torment and misery than virtually any other factor.
As citizens of very different and sometimes clashing civilizations, the United States and Iran respectively, we also have a unique vantage point on the polarized mind. While so many theories of human destructiveness are associated with regional customs, mores and histories, we have observed the polarized mind at work in widely divergent cultural, ethnic and economic circumstances.
Moreover, we are in complete agreement that the polarized mind is one of the major threats to humanity, not just isolated parts of the world. Our empirically based studies, for example, have indicated that mindlessness—a condition of narrowed perception and reactivity—is a chief and cross-cultural feature of the polarized mind; while (Langerian) mindfulness, an attitude of heightened awareness or presence, is a cardinal feature of the depolarized mind, associated with capacity for discovery, creativity and well-being. It is also associated with a radical transformation of consciousness, but this consciousness cannot flourish until it counterbalances and, to the extent possible, supersedes the polarized mind.
What is the basis for the polarized mind? While there are many contributing factors, from family and cultural conditioning to scarcity of resources to availability of weapons to neuropsychological dispositions, the common denominators among all these factors appears to be fear and anxiety. As an array of studies has shown, people tend to become polarized—fixated and extreme—in the face of helplessness, anxiety and fear.
This condition not only tends to make people feel small and insignificant, but ultimately—if the helplessness, anxiety and fear are strong enough—as if their very lives are at stake. The result of this outcome is that people will do all they can to avoid such death anxiety, including becoming violent and oppressive themselves as a defense.
The polarized mind has thus become associated with a range of extremist behaviors from despotism to racism to xenophobia to the obsession with power and control. Such cycles are evident in history: whenever people experience individual or collective trauma, such as wars, economic collapse and personal or cultural displacement, and they are unable to acquire the psychosocial support necessary to address these upheavals, the polarized mind is likely to predominate.
Today we are faced with one of the most polarizing world situations in decades as authoritarian rule has undergone a revival, and we are faced once again with the challenge: Are we going to stick our heads in the sand and ignore the hurts and insults that have led to our divisiveness, thus perpetuating a persistent cycle of human devitalization? Or are we going to consider the findings of our hard-won psychological, spiritual and philosophical disciplines and face the wounds that beset us?
From our vantage point as investigators, there is little question that the latter course is preferable and through mindful, widespread dialogue we see an opening. There are already grassroots movements in this latter direction, and we see our personal interchanges as an aspect of those. But on a larger scale, there are growing opportunities for meaningful cross-cultural exchange and for live person-to-person encounters.
One such opportunity is a group called Better Angels, to which one of the authors of this article (Kirk Schneider) belongs. Better Angels is now active in dozens of U.S. states and has conducted hundreds of workshops. These workshops consist of structured living-room style dialogues between self-identified liberals and conservatives from a range of backgrounds and appear to be yielding promising results.
The key here is the presence or mindfulness to which we alluded earlier. To the extent that interacting parties can approach each other with openness, curiosity and respect, the greater the likelihood that they will acquire the fruit of their contacts—the ability to learn about and potentially find common ground with a formerly polarizing mind.
Hmm.
3. Interesting... HBO Limited Series based on PARASITE film
4.A Discovery of Witches is coming back for a S2 in 2020, they just don't know when in 2020.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 11:52 pm (UTC)My difficulty with Parasite was I felt that a lot of the characters were underdeveloped. I didn't care that much about any of them. I didn't know enough to care. I got small little glimpses. I honestly think it would be more interesting as a series.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 03:28 am (UTC)Television is kind of like a novel, while film is a short story. Some stories work better as novels.