Jane Austen Fans & Game Theorists as Collaborators in Modelling Institutional Social Dynamics
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- Опубликовано: 10 сен 2024
- In this video, make the case that we need academic disciplines with different sub-specialties. Working together, Jane Austen fans and computer geeks could model the decision-making dynamic around important institutional groups.
I love how you enunciate, and the content is very interesting. Pleasing to listen.
I guess the most obvious implication of my model of truly prosocial dynamics for your board meeting with the two sets of flies on the wall is that everyone involved can be understood to suffer from antisocial and pseudo-social motives and biases which will effect their respective assessments of the situation. I think that there is a sense in which specialization into separate disciplines ("Science" in the most general sense of knowing and evaluating things in relative isolation and from one perspective), inhibits the healthy functioning of "Conscience" (which is the faculty of "Knowing-Together", in which the "together" includes both the subjective and the objective aspects of existence, so as to arrive at an "honest truth" rather than a "dishonest truth" in which there are "lies of omission or misdirection, tacitly and often unconsciously agreed to by all involved. I guess this amounts to a kind of "who will watch the watchers" type problem.
But just to clarify my previous post, my differing model of the Prosocial seems to me justified by the existence of "black swans" both subjectively and objectively, in all four quadrants of coawaress I previously referred to. I am sure you have read Nassim Taleb's book. I this context, i am saying the existence of the unknown (as well the "unconceived of" and emergent), advises against any of your participants taking for granted there own individual of collective prosociality in the sense of world that I am adopting. This is true regarding the inevitability of both pleasant and unpleasant surprises, and both subjectively and objectively. Indeed Such positive (or negative) "taking for granted" is already a kind of antisocial collusion which both sets of "flies on the wall"will share equally with the participants in the board meeting.
Much better to establish True Community by (among other things) removing the extrinsic competitive (carrot or stick) motivations from the institution in question, seeing it as, first in foremost, a group of people all of whom are suffering from a shared sick culture of denial (like everybody else) but who (like everybody else) equally have resources of courage and honesty that it is part of the responsibility of any institution to nourish regardless of its outer mission. This will allow "conscience" to flourish on the part of all concerned since no one has to hide of "dissociate" their "shadow" of sick culture from themselves or others for fear of punishment (including in indirect punishment of seeing someone else rewarded). True Prosocial institutions must be about not only outer healing, but about the healing of those in the institution well. After all, how can an institution be more healthy than the people who comprise it?
It seems useful here to say that the concept of "health" I am using here is "biopsychosocial and ecological". I think such a general conception of health (and implicitly of sickness),is itself healthy, conscientious and prosocial, in that it does not lead to the kind over-specialized diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments that "cure" say, a biological/medlical problem in a way that intensifies social, psychological or ecological ones....or that "cures" a public problem is a way that intensifies, (or even introduces new), private ones (which will inevitably manifest in some area of the public realm). The dissociation of the public and the private realms is, like the dissociation of the inner and the outer reality generally, anti-social...
In honor of the recent 248th birthday of Jane Austen, my daughter, Amanda Fagan, will be releasing a 6-song EP album, with each song dedicated to one character in each of Jane's six most popular books. In Amanda's words, "Something people might not know about me is that I am an avid reader of classics and Austen is my favorite author. I had read her books “Pride and Prejudice” and “Persuasion” a few years back, but over the past summer I made it my goal to re-read them as well as dive into the rest of her novels. This upcoming album consists of 6 songs, each inspired by one of Austen’s novels, from “Sense and Sensibility” to “Persuasion.” The theme of this album is love, so I thought it would be perfect to release it in February, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
“Love, Jane” will be out 2/2/24 on all streaming platforms.
I have a different definition of "Prosocial" that I would like to run by you. It requires accepting at face value the lived experience of the correlative nature of inner and outer existence, so that it becomes clear that trying to reduce the objective "outer world" to the subjective, "inner world" ( or the subjective" inner world" to the objective "outer world"), is like trying to reduce "Up" to "Down" or trying to reduce one side of a coin to the other. Holding this point of view, one can see that if there is sickness and health outwardly in the world there is also sickness and health inwardly. One might represent this coexistential reality as a circle with 4 quadrants: outer sick culture, outer healthy culture, inner sick culture, and inner healthy culture.
To be "Prosocial" then would involve acknowledging, including (and so "Associating" and not "Dissociating") each of these quadrants in ones framing of shared existence,.. For example, uniting with others under the tacit agreement to ignore (to keep out of frame) the existence of our own sick culture is a form of "antisocializing" in which we are being controlled by that very sick culture (which is of course being reinforced and enabled by outer sick culture and institutions). Of course it would be just as antisocial to collude to keep out of frame the coexistence of our innate health and healing possibilities (or, the ways in which the more healthy parts of the outer world enable and support them).
Clearly intelligent, responsible and sustainable healthy interaction depends on the inclusive Prosocial and equal framing of these four aspects of our shared reality. Prosocial interaction (which is both subjective and objective) is thus inconsistent with either righteousness or shame, (with either "hand waving" or "hand wringing") and indeed with either reward or punishment of self or other. A Prosocial relationship is like that one hopes would exist between two people who run into each other inside a burning building: a balanced shared awareness of the fire "outside" us and the likelihood of "smoke" and other problems "inside" us would exist only in the context of a tacit (and hope giving) , awareness of the coexistence of "non-fire" outside, and "non-smoke" inside as well. In this way both cocky bravado and panicked despair are avoided and thanks to the shared prosocial framing, the two people can consciously cooperate effectively, addressing both the inner and outer aspects of a problematic situation in a coordinated way. I call this balanced inclusive awareness "coawareness" and understand it to be the essence of any prosocial interaction....
From this point of view, the institutions you claim to be Prosocial are likely not Prosocial but what I would call "pseudo-social" (or perhaps "Pseudo-prosocial") institutions formed in unawareness of their participation in our shared sick culture. To the extent that this is true, the institutions and their members will be at the mercy of that which they are keeping out of frame. To be prosocial an institution must have an effective "Conscience" in the form of regular processes or events that cultivate coawareness and so avoid the above alluded to Hand Waving and Hand Wringing etc and maintain both the institution and its members in a state of flexible and dynamic recovery rather than one of rigid static and disintegration denial.
There is of course much more to all of this and I have not even begun to relate any of it explicitly to Jane Austen and Game Theory, but this reply already feels almost as long as your presentation so I'll stop here. Some of how this would apply can perhaps be inferred but I'll try to say something about it more explicitly in another post...
Thanks for Posting!
I think that a lot of "Jane Austen Fans" are often sociology/psychology majors. It's really a shame that degrees in the humanities are seen as "lesser than" fields like science or economics, when they synergize so well.