People talk, listen, understand and react differently, depending on their habitual “Style of Communication”. Without awareness of these differences, we may tend to make judgments and classify people.
Observation of subjects always takes place within a particular setting (island, bias 1). It is limited in time (snapshot, bias 2). It is happening within a timeframe of subject’s current condition resulting from his/her latest interactions (bias 3). If the subject is aware of the observation, his/her behavior will be modified (spotlight, bias 4). The observer has a number of his/her own pre-existing programming (bias 5).
How can we be sure that the conclusions from the observation are peeled off of these factors?
Thanks for commenting Dan; a few weeks back we were having lively interactions. I have had some outside projects that pulled me away.
I am going to understand that you are referring to Deborah Tannen, who made these observations and who came up with some kind of "generalizations". This is the only book I read by Tannen. She is a Ph.D. in Linguistics, from the University of California, Berkeley, 1979, and a Professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. 1991-present.
In other words, she is a scientist. Scientists make generalizations, which they call theories, so that they can make some sense out of myriad anecdotal observations. Someone might have something to say about every generalization; for instance:
If you do a study that finds women are more likely than men to make suggestions rather than give orders, you risk being accused of reinforcing stereotypes of women as manipulative, and of men as bullies. (I really don't see where such a comment is going? Other that a try to gain "one-ups-manship".)
What she is saying is: Conversational style is made up of habits with regard to pacing and pausing, indirectness, use of questions, apologizing, or ritual apologizing, and so on. Knowing the patterns makes it possible to understand others as well as yourself, and to be flexible in your style. The best style is one that is flexible. Tendencies should not be mistaken for norms.
With regard to the five biases, They are a particular setting, in a particular time frame, flowing out of the last interchange, subject to a new awareness that has just unfolded, and from preexisting programming. Working through these biases is the expertise of the scientist.
Setting; To write this book she was invited into many corporate settings, in many fields, manufacturing, banking, legal, health, non-profits, sales, marketing, publishing, and others. She sat in on conversations and meetings at all levels, from one-on-one, to board meetings, and took notes on what was said by whom, and even recorded many meetings and analyze the transcripts. She also referred to (at least a dozen) work by other linguistic researchers doing the same thing, and used their findings as examples.
I don't know the time frame. The other biases, I think she was able to overcome.
I have more posts ready on this topic, but I don't want to dump them all out at once. Good to see you again.
Hello again, WNT. I was not referring to the book (which I don’t know) or to the presented concepts (one-sentence mentions are not of much value, anyway). I was addressing your expertise or practice (since you are referring to another source).
We can call these questions the preparation of the ground of the researcher. I can’t believe that anyone can work out their prejudices and take anything objectively. Especially researchers or scientists whose existence, livelihood, prestige, fame, face, family, employment and future depend on their compliance with the system which has given them all this.
I don’t expect any researcher having resolved these biases. Simple, one-sentence disclaimers would do the trick.
I think these disclaimers and warnings against own biases should be repeated in bold type in every publication. We don’t do that. And we progressively and increasingly become more self-assured of our own theories and concepts, and newer generations simply refer to the past - just as you did - as if the past theories were “true” or “valuable” or “verified”. It’s a dead end.
We can see this with the massively perpetuated theories of Darwin, Marx/Engels, Copernicus, Freud, Jenner, Einstein and more. They are all either false from the ground up or long inaccurate (due to developments in the relevant sciences) or insufficient to explain away “everything”.
In short, we are all groping in the dark. And we don’t have the guts to admit it and say openly, “We are trying to find explanations, and we will make mistakes because this is the nature of this life.” But no, instead we take on fancy letters and titles and positions and get paid for pretending that “we know”. This is the most generalized generalization I can find.
OK, what are my experiences and practices? I couldn't say that I had permanent judgments based on my economic advantage, and that I sought to fit them into every occasion to prove they were true, and that I was right to have them. Some omissions are just accidental, that I never thought about it in that way.
How do you know if what is from the past has any validity? You apply it, and if it changes the results, you're on-to-something, or if it leaves the result unchanged, you seek excuses why it doesn't work. Perhaps the five biases are hurdles, until they aren't. Of course I have a cultural bias, that I am constantly examining. Also the English language has its built in biases. The industries that I am commenting on exist in the same culture and the same language, so I don't see those biases as a fundamental barrier. They're equal for both sides.
Seeing that people speak from different conventions changes your perception, and opens you up to listening in an instant. It is enough just to receive the suggestion, a one-sentence mention. When you are talking about researchers or scientists whose existence, livelihood, prestige, fame, face, family, employment and future depend on their compliance with the system which has given them all of this, you must be referring to big projects that will be used as the justification for $ Billion dollar programs. Global warming, the green new deal, carbon trading, finishing with fossil fuel, vaccine therapy and mandates for mass inoculation, all these are contentious subjects. Of course there is Russia phobia, and the building of bombs.
How to understand each other in a business meeting does not have big money behind it. Tannen was financed by those companies who invited her to monitor their private meetings, because they wanted better results within company interaction. "Some of the companies that I can name, because they chose not to remain anonymous, are Ben & Jerry’s, Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc., Corning Inc., Essex County A.R.C., and Rohm and Haas." At all these and the other companies where I talked to people and observed interaction, I was deeply impressed and moved by the intelligence, dedication, and spirit of those who trusted me with their own stories and conversations.
We live in a complex urbanized society. There are 100's of thousands of things, devices, processes, and thousands of institutions that allow this urbanization. If we are all just groping in the dark, and all of fancy science is just pretending "we know", how did urbanization happen? I hope that you can give me your answer to this.
Did it all just happen by itself, by the miracle of the "free market", in the absence of scientific input?
How did “it” happen? “It” meaning anything, no limits. The answer is very simple: we don’t know. We don’t need to know “how”.
100 years ago there were very few universities, centers of theoretical thoughts and “scientists”. There were very few affluent people who didn’t know what “work” means. There were very few politicians (including state servants), and very few lawyers, doctors or teachers. These are all classes of people who do not contribute to the society. Either they are provided by the society (doctors or teachers) or they deplete the society of the results of their work (law, taxes, politics, power groups).
These non-contributing classes continuously invent new ways of ripping the labor force of their money. The creation of the myth of some higher value inherent to universities (or education in general) has long been such a trick. And common people fall for it. To the extent that they take out loans to pursue the empty promise of a vague better future.
Now we have millions of highly educated people who are completely useless to the society. And more and more are being manufactured every year. These people are basically unemployable. So they make up fictions, write books about their fictions, develop philosophies, dogmas, theories, systems and visions. All empty stories, with no relevance to the tangible world.
We’ve gone from simple communication to PR, to marketing, advertising, lobbying, damage control, franchising, insurance schemes, to finally finding the goldmine of business myths - which are all lies in essence. Sustainable, green, environmental, equality, diversity, climate lies, fossil fuel lies, history lies, “bad guys” lies, -sms lies, election fictions, control over media and message, are all myths needed by the business to cover up insatiable greed for power. Now this is an enormous cult of people who do not know what work is, who have never worked in their lives, and who do not intend to work ever. To use a metaphor, they are spreading and metastasizing wherever they can smell one dime they can slip into their own pocket regardless of honor, morals, law, integrity or decency.
This growing cult of useless people must justify their parasitic existence. So they speak, write, podcast, substack, travel, lecture, hire ghostwriters… all empty words, empty promises, all clad with immunity and hidden behind luxury barriers which only serve to make them inaccessible to common people. Despite $$ trillions flowing to them and through them, the Earth and all its inhabitants are being abused 24/7. Having no social obligations and duties to physically perform, these useless beings have too much free time. And they are nonstop inventing new ways to kill this time. And they kill everything else alongside.
This is how a lot of “it” is happening. Unnecessary, useless, destructive, fleeting. In every area of our existence.
Good point Dan. Yeah and now they're so lazy, they get A.I. to write for them!!
My friend has pointed out this tendency in carpentry. The interior cabinetry jobs used to be reserved for the older guys who could physically no longer do the "hard" work the younger men were capable of doing. Now here the younger guys appear who want to specialize in only the easiest, interior carpentry jobs from the beginning.
In my humble experience, the best "self-help" books have come not from guys who spend most of their writing outlining what's wrong over and over - but from educators who have the benefits of trying out their "theories" on people and getting their feedback about what works and what doesn't work.
Also, I evaluate advice based directly on how much positive action the author includes that's a solution to the problems they address.
Now ANYBODY can write a book.
How much of their writing outlines the problems and needs for their solutions? Do they offer ANY solutions? How much of the book is involved in spelling out and discussing their solutions?
If the ratio is half - that's acceptable. Beyond half... I suspect the practical employment of their solutions. The question I have is, is this just some guy sitting in their home imagining they "know how things are, how they work and what's the nature of "reality?" Less than half of spelling out what's wrong compared to how much of the book is involved with solutions - that's GREAT!
I’m afraid you know the answer to your question. Yes, these are large numbers of people who sip coffee and write “solutions” without even thinking about the “how”. It’s all courtesy to software. Architects are almost extinct. Autocad have replaced them, with tons of software which runs all pipelines, breaks down all storeys and spreads all streets and sewers in a matter of minutes, all with one click. Everyday objects are being designed (software again) without being tested, and we buy them, and they break on first use. Cars and appliances are being designed this way, except the software calculates there the material needed to self-destroy a particular piece after 6 months or xxx cycles of use.
Plenty of jobs are gone. Which means that thousands of people won’t find work there. They naturally migrate to “shop assistant specialist” or “blogger specialist” or “influencer expert” “careers”. The smart ones go into politics, zero work, a lot of talking, walking, travelling, speaking, the perfect illusion. The lazy ones write handbooks and “how to” instructions by mastering copy-paste. The evil ones go into research medicine, the area which needs to cause more illnesses to feed more scientists and doctors. And the clones of the two old guys from the Muppets write substacks :-)
It’s becoming a weird place. Over the last 30 years or so. Amazing, in a sense. It’s time to rethink our options for the next incarnation. Returning here is no longer an attractive choice, it seems.
Observation of subjects always takes place within a particular setting (island, bias 1). It is limited in time (snapshot, bias 2). It is happening within a timeframe of subject’s current condition resulting from his/her latest interactions (bias 3). If the subject is aware of the observation, his/her behavior will be modified (spotlight, bias 4). The observer has a number of his/her own pre-existing programming (bias 5).
How can we be sure that the conclusions from the observation are peeled off of these factors?
Thanks for commenting Dan; a few weeks back we were having lively interactions. I have had some outside projects that pulled me away.
I am going to understand that you are referring to Deborah Tannen, who made these observations and who came up with some kind of "generalizations". This is the only book I read by Tannen. She is a Ph.D. in Linguistics, from the University of California, Berkeley, 1979, and a Professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. 1991-present.
In other words, she is a scientist. Scientists make generalizations, which they call theories, so that they can make some sense out of myriad anecdotal observations. Someone might have something to say about every generalization; for instance:
If you do a study that finds women are more likely than men to make suggestions rather than give orders, you risk being accused of reinforcing stereotypes of women as manipulative, and of men as bullies. (I really don't see where such a comment is going? Other that a try to gain "one-ups-manship".)
What she is saying is: Conversational style is made up of habits with regard to pacing and pausing, indirectness, use of questions, apologizing, or ritual apologizing, and so on. Knowing the patterns makes it possible to understand others as well as yourself, and to be flexible in your style. The best style is one that is flexible. Tendencies should not be mistaken for norms.
With regard to the five biases, They are a particular setting, in a particular time frame, flowing out of the last interchange, subject to a new awareness that has just unfolded, and from preexisting programming. Working through these biases is the expertise of the scientist.
Setting; To write this book she was invited into many corporate settings, in many fields, manufacturing, banking, legal, health, non-profits, sales, marketing, publishing, and others. She sat in on conversations and meetings at all levels, from one-on-one, to board meetings, and took notes on what was said by whom, and even recorded many meetings and analyze the transcripts. She also referred to (at least a dozen) work by other linguistic researchers doing the same thing, and used their findings as examples.
I don't know the time frame. The other biases, I think she was able to overcome.
I have more posts ready on this topic, but I don't want to dump them all out at once. Good to see you again.
.
Hello again, WNT. I was not referring to the book (which I don’t know) or to the presented concepts (one-sentence mentions are not of much value, anyway). I was addressing your expertise or practice (since you are referring to another source).
We can call these questions the preparation of the ground of the researcher. I can’t believe that anyone can work out their prejudices and take anything objectively. Especially researchers or scientists whose existence, livelihood, prestige, fame, face, family, employment and future depend on their compliance with the system which has given them all this.
I don’t expect any researcher having resolved these biases. Simple, one-sentence disclaimers would do the trick.
I think these disclaimers and warnings against own biases should be repeated in bold type in every publication. We don’t do that. And we progressively and increasingly become more self-assured of our own theories and concepts, and newer generations simply refer to the past - just as you did - as if the past theories were “true” or “valuable” or “verified”. It’s a dead end.
We can see this with the massively perpetuated theories of Darwin, Marx/Engels, Copernicus, Freud, Jenner, Einstein and more. They are all either false from the ground up or long inaccurate (due to developments in the relevant sciences) or insufficient to explain away “everything”.
In short, we are all groping in the dark. And we don’t have the guts to admit it and say openly, “We are trying to find explanations, and we will make mistakes because this is the nature of this life.” But no, instead we take on fancy letters and titles and positions and get paid for pretending that “we know”. This is the most generalized generalization I can find.
OK, what are my experiences and practices? I couldn't say that I had permanent judgments based on my economic advantage, and that I sought to fit them into every occasion to prove they were true, and that I was right to have them. Some omissions are just accidental, that I never thought about it in that way.
How do you know if what is from the past has any validity? You apply it, and if it changes the results, you're on-to-something, or if it leaves the result unchanged, you seek excuses why it doesn't work. Perhaps the five biases are hurdles, until they aren't. Of course I have a cultural bias, that I am constantly examining. Also the English language has its built in biases. The industries that I am commenting on exist in the same culture and the same language, so I don't see those biases as a fundamental barrier. They're equal for both sides.
Seeing that people speak from different conventions changes your perception, and opens you up to listening in an instant. It is enough just to receive the suggestion, a one-sentence mention. When you are talking about researchers or scientists whose existence, livelihood, prestige, fame, face, family, employment and future depend on their compliance with the system which has given them all of this, you must be referring to big projects that will be used as the justification for $ Billion dollar programs. Global warming, the green new deal, carbon trading, finishing with fossil fuel, vaccine therapy and mandates for mass inoculation, all these are contentious subjects. Of course there is Russia phobia, and the building of bombs.
How to understand each other in a business meeting does not have big money behind it. Tannen was financed by those companies who invited her to monitor their private meetings, because they wanted better results within company interaction. "Some of the companies that I can name, because they chose not to remain anonymous, are Ben & Jerry’s, Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc., Corning Inc., Essex County A.R.C., and Rohm and Haas." At all these and the other companies where I talked to people and observed interaction, I was deeply impressed and moved by the intelligence, dedication, and spirit of those who trusted me with their own stories and conversations.
We live in a complex urbanized society. There are 100's of thousands of things, devices, processes, and thousands of institutions that allow this urbanization. If we are all just groping in the dark, and all of fancy science is just pretending "we know", how did urbanization happen? I hope that you can give me your answer to this.
Did it all just happen by itself, by the miracle of the "free market", in the absence of scientific input?
Thanks
.
How did “it” happen? “It” meaning anything, no limits. The answer is very simple: we don’t know. We don’t need to know “how”.
100 years ago there were very few universities, centers of theoretical thoughts and “scientists”. There were very few affluent people who didn’t know what “work” means. There were very few politicians (including state servants), and very few lawyers, doctors or teachers. These are all classes of people who do not contribute to the society. Either they are provided by the society (doctors or teachers) or they deplete the society of the results of their work (law, taxes, politics, power groups).
These non-contributing classes continuously invent new ways of ripping the labor force of their money. The creation of the myth of some higher value inherent to universities (or education in general) has long been such a trick. And common people fall for it. To the extent that they take out loans to pursue the empty promise of a vague better future.
Now we have millions of highly educated people who are completely useless to the society. And more and more are being manufactured every year. These people are basically unemployable. So they make up fictions, write books about their fictions, develop philosophies, dogmas, theories, systems and visions. All empty stories, with no relevance to the tangible world.
We’ve gone from simple communication to PR, to marketing, advertising, lobbying, damage control, franchising, insurance schemes, to finally finding the goldmine of business myths - which are all lies in essence. Sustainable, green, environmental, equality, diversity, climate lies, fossil fuel lies, history lies, “bad guys” lies, -sms lies, election fictions, control over media and message, are all myths needed by the business to cover up insatiable greed for power. Now this is an enormous cult of people who do not know what work is, who have never worked in their lives, and who do not intend to work ever. To use a metaphor, they are spreading and metastasizing wherever they can smell one dime they can slip into their own pocket regardless of honor, morals, law, integrity or decency.
This growing cult of useless people must justify their parasitic existence. So they speak, write, podcast, substack, travel, lecture, hire ghostwriters… all empty words, empty promises, all clad with immunity and hidden behind luxury barriers which only serve to make them inaccessible to common people. Despite $$ trillions flowing to them and through them, the Earth and all its inhabitants are being abused 24/7. Having no social obligations and duties to physically perform, these useless beings have too much free time. And they are nonstop inventing new ways to kill this time. And they kill everything else alongside.
This is how a lot of “it” is happening. Unnecessary, useless, destructive, fleeting. In every area of our existence.
Good point Dan. Yeah and now they're so lazy, they get A.I. to write for them!!
My friend has pointed out this tendency in carpentry. The interior cabinetry jobs used to be reserved for the older guys who could physically no longer do the "hard" work the younger men were capable of doing. Now here the younger guys appear who want to specialize in only the easiest, interior carpentry jobs from the beginning.
In my humble experience, the best "self-help" books have come not from guys who spend most of their writing outlining what's wrong over and over - but from educators who have the benefits of trying out their "theories" on people and getting their feedback about what works and what doesn't work.
Also, I evaluate advice based directly on how much positive action the author includes that's a solution to the problems they address.
Now ANYBODY can write a book.
How much of their writing outlines the problems and needs for their solutions? Do they offer ANY solutions? How much of the book is involved in spelling out and discussing their solutions?
If the ratio is half - that's acceptable. Beyond half... I suspect the practical employment of their solutions. The question I have is, is this just some guy sitting in their home imagining they "know how things are, how they work and what's the nature of "reality?" Less than half of spelling out what's wrong compared to how much of the book is involved with solutions - that's GREAT!
I’m afraid you know the answer to your question. Yes, these are large numbers of people who sip coffee and write “solutions” without even thinking about the “how”. It’s all courtesy to software. Architects are almost extinct. Autocad have replaced them, with tons of software which runs all pipelines, breaks down all storeys and spreads all streets and sewers in a matter of minutes, all with one click. Everyday objects are being designed (software again) without being tested, and we buy them, and they break on first use. Cars and appliances are being designed this way, except the software calculates there the material needed to self-destroy a particular piece after 6 months or xxx cycles of use.
Plenty of jobs are gone. Which means that thousands of people won’t find work there. They naturally migrate to “shop assistant specialist” or “blogger specialist” or “influencer expert” “careers”. The smart ones go into politics, zero work, a lot of talking, walking, travelling, speaking, the perfect illusion. The lazy ones write handbooks and “how to” instructions by mastering copy-paste. The evil ones go into research medicine, the area which needs to cause more illnesses to feed more scientists and doctors. And the clones of the two old guys from the Muppets write substacks :-)
It’s becoming a weird place. Over the last 30 years or so. Amazing, in a sense. It’s time to rethink our options for the next incarnation. Returning here is no longer an attractive choice, it seems.