nehrlich

That self-fulfilling prophecy thing happens in a lot more contexts than just education. I think it colors most of our social interactions, especially with random strangers. Approach people with the assumption that they are decent and helpful, and most people will try to live up to that expectation; approach with hostility and be treated in kind.

I like your social context idea because it gives an explanation for that phenomenon: your mental state when you're encountering a random stranger is going to be reflected in your posture, your facial expression, your body language -- all of which are things that we're very good at interpreting at an unconscious level. So your attitude sets a social context that activates an appropriate facet of the other person's personality. Hunh. Neat!

Your point about who you choose to associate with being a choice about which self you want to be -- that's pretty deep, actually.

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It definitely goes beyond education and cults - those were just some obvious examples. But I like your example. A lot. Blink actually has a great section about facial expressions, and how they are basically close to telepathy, because our facial expressions are connected directly to our brain in ways we can't control. He interviews some expert dude who reads facial expressions for a living, and who says that even if somebody's lying, flashes of their true mental state will always break through. And vice versa - if you make the facial expression, your mental state will soon follow; if you smile, you become happier. Which ties into your idea that we create our own social context and how strangers react to us. Nifty.

It also helps to resolve a question we've discussed before, whether sunny optimistic people who have good luck are sunny and optimistic because they have good luck, or whether they have good luck because they are sunny and optimistic (and similarly for grumpy people who have consistently bad luck). As your first paragraph points out, there may be a causative correlation after all.

Oh, and you still owe me an explanation of the connection between contextual identity and empathy.

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Okay, lemme try. They're both tied to the fact that identity is mutable. In contextual identity, different facets of your identity get activated by the social context. In empathy, you're (consciously or unconsciously) trying to establish an internal/mental context that will activate the facets of your identity most like the person that you're trying to empathize with.

Maybe? Or something like that. There's this important process of trying to do a mapping between your own mental model of the universe and somebody else's mind-world, and empathy is one expression of that process. Synchronizing your own mental universe with somebody else's involves flexing your identity into a different shape. And I think part of how we do it is by constructing a virutal mental context that activates the right facets of self.

This is still vague in my mind, so I hope that makes any sense at all.

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It makes sense. I like where you're going with this. Some immediate thoughts - the connection between empathy and contextual identity makes sense to me - the people I know who are empathetic are often the people who are best at being social chameleons, able to fit in no matter what the social context is. I'm thinking of people like Tstop or Bradley.

On the flipside, the people who are the same person no matter what social context they're in are often fairly clueless about what other people are thinking. Generalizing wildly, these people are often the ones who have strict black and white moral codes and things like that. Because they can't imagine another way of viewing the world, they treat the world as if it's absolute and unchanging (sometimes literally, in the case of creationists).

Hrm. I'm going to have to toss that into the mix of things I'm mulling over. Too many thoughts. Which is a good thing - seems like this model is a fertile conversation starter

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So, basically, you're saying that you are our fault?

Then again, you did choose us...

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it was a mutually beneficial relationship - I chose TEP because it seemed like a place where I could let loose some of the aspects of my weirdness that had been somewhat repressed in high school. And TEP shaped me by encouraging such weirdness, and giving me the confidence to be that self fully. And then I helped to shape TEP as I encouraged the next generation. Or some such.

But, yeah. Good job at reading between the lines. My next post was actually going to be a case study of these ideas, using TEP and pre-FOC MIT rush in general. And a look at other examples from my life where such choices were made. Something like that. We'll see if it comes together from the inchoate musings currently running through my head.

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Y'know, after we've got enough blog-conversation source fodder, we should write a book together.

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Yeah, definitely. One of the reasons I'm starting to think more about prescription than description is it's easier to sell a book if I can provide solutions to customers' problems.

One of the things I'm hoping to do with my upcoming vacation to NYC is spend some time trying to take some of the ideas we've been discussing on my blog and organize them into outlines of various possible book ideas that might be pitch-able. I've got at least three kernels so far - the story-centric book, the "extreme management" book, and now something with cognitive subroutines. With a lot of overlap between them, obviously, since everything's connected in my head.

I'm also trying to figure out how to target the ideas. I'm not going to be able to get away with an academic approach obviously, because I haven't done the primary research. The story one could be a pop-sci type book, like Gladwell's stuff. The management one is obviously business-oriented, where I'd have to make up processes to follow with appropriate terminology. And the cognitive subroutines one could actually be aimed at the self-help market if I spun it right. Or pop-sci. Not sure. I'm still wildly speculating. It's not like I've actually done any research on publishing or anything like that.

But it's kind of scary to look back and realize how many words I've written over the past year - that's a lot of verbiage. it'd be nice if I could make something come of it. We'll see.

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