From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Nov 26 2001 - 15:01:03 MST
On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> In particular, any statement in the form "X is Y" should
> automatically be interpreted as "I believe that X is Y".
Yes, of course -- everything is entirely subjective. But
there is a big difference between my saying "The sky is blue"
and "I feel that the sky is red". One is a commonly accepted
assertion. The other most people would assume had a significant
amount of self-interpretive "value" added (and would not be
something they might feel required to comment on one way or
another).
> That's certainly what I mean when I use a
> statement like that, and I certainly do take personal
> responsibility for my own beliefs, whether or not I choose
> to waste space on weasel words to say so.
Lots of us take responsibility for our "believing" our own
words (and extropians do better than most at backing them
up with some hard data most of the time) -- but what I
think is needed is greater "personal responsibility" for
how the other person might receive the communication.
Because Extropians are so used to speaking with others who
inherently reject disagree with their perspectives, I think
we may to easily fall into the trap of "These are my beliefs
and nothing you can say is going to change my mind" (because
I've actually devoted some rational thought, or a fair amount
of study, etc. to why I have them [rather than just accepting
what my parents or society handed me on a plate]). The
problem is we need to switch tracks when we come back to
the Extropian list -- this is our "tribe" and many of us
devoted significant energies to developing our positions.
So we need an inherent respect for that investment.
Getting an "old" Extropian to change their mind is
probably more difficult than herding cats. So we have
to *think* about how the other person is going to process
the arguments we present and present them in the most
acceptable manner to that person. That is the difference
between a good communicator someone who merely types fast.
Now of course the problem with a "list" is that packaging
your arguments for one person probably means you may have
unpackaged them for many others. That is one of the things
that gets discovered in scientific review -- places where things
might be entirely obvious to the scientist and their lab -- but where
the reviewers significantly misinterpret what is being presented.
I agree English is a terrible language -- all I'm suggesting is
we attempt to catch ourselves when things might be misinterpreted
and add an IBT, IFT, IMO, etc. The language spoken in Udmurtia
(Udmurt) has a verb past tense that indicates something happened
but the speaker wasn't witness to it. There may also be aspects
of Aymara that have truth/reality perspectives (I haven't investigated
this in detail). We could of course make up some additional
conjugations for English to express which "reality" we are
talking about (our personal one, the extropian one, the
generally accepted fundamentalist one (with a few subtypes
depending on which religion), the conventional scientific
one or the physical one. But by the time we got through
however, I don't think it would much resemble English,
would only be understood by only a select few and would
clearly put us well on the path to becoming a cult.
I'm simply requesting that people attempt to think a little
bit more about the "receiving" side of the communication,
not just the sending side.
Robert
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