Legibility, Illegibility, Anti-Legibility

luka

Well-known member
Adam Elkus:
> Broadly speaking, Alice ideally must first be sphinxlike in character to pull any of this off. She must foster [[ambiguity]] about what her ultimate goals are in order to have an advantage over those around her. This style of behavior is called “robust action” in sociology. For Alice to be an ideal manipulator, her actions must be interpretable from multiple perspectives at once, potentially function as moves in multiple [[concepts/games|games]] at once, and conceal her public and private motivations. This maintains her flexibility and discretion and thwarts attempts by rivals to narrow her space of choices. Forced clarification of her [[commitment|commitments]] and lock-in to hard goals only gives Bob an ability to constrain her.
i wonder how many people have 'ultimate goals'? a handful of psychopaths perhaps. for the rest of us, well, we might have the immediate goal of getting a sandwich?
 

luka

Well-known member
i think that these models for understanding human behaviour are not very good really. you can, i suppose, say that someone making a joke for example is trying to 'manipulate' his audience into laughing, or that by making them laugh is trying to 'manipulate' them into liking him, but it doesnt seem very satisfactory. reductive and misanthropic, to coin a phrase.
 
Maybe the word manipulate means deception to you but you can manipulate water to quench the thirst of and bathe a city luke!

I do think it’s a good basis to understand behaviour, someone is trying to get their needs met by influencing others
 
by 1730, a method of digging ore, from French manipulation, from manipule "handful" (a pharmacists' measure), from Latin manipulus "handful, sheaf, bundle," from manus "hand" (from PIE root *man- (2) "hand") + root of plere "to fill" (from PIE root *pele- (1) "to fill"). Sense of "skillful handling of objects" is attested by 1826; extended 1828 to "handling or managing of persons," especially to one's own advantage.
 

luka

Well-known member
but i think what you and Gus have in common is that you are social climbers so you both are focussed on an Ultimate Goal and everything you do is related to that attempt to climb the ladder
 

luka

Well-known member
but for most of us we just want to cruise along and have a laugh so this all seems very cold and alien to us
 

luka

Well-known member
only two books in your house, the art of war and the prince, thats it, oh, and the game, three books, the game is there too
 

sus

Well-known member
i think that these models for understanding human behaviour are not very good really. you can, i suppose, say that someone making a joke for example is trying to 'manipulate' his audience into laughing, or that by making them laugh is trying to 'manipulate' them into liking him, but it doesnt seem very satisfactory. reductive and misanthropic, to coin a phrase.
I understand that tonally calling a joke manipulation is jarring

But can you honestly tell me the point of telling a joke isn't making people laugh

And what is making people laugh except altering their behavior through stimulus
 

sus

Well-known member
The conscious/unconscious process is something which bothers me at times. I've talked before about going through periods of being incredibly aware of basic things I wouldn't normally be, things like having skin or walking or breathing and it throwing me off. It's like suddenly forgetting how to ride a bike whilst in the saddle.
I was thinking about your "spotlight of the mind" metaphor for consciousness a lot on a recent mushroom trip. Apparently Jaynes talked about the "flashlight" of consciousness in a dark room, searching around for what it's not sure's there
 
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