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koganbotPiece in the New York Times about smiling ("More to a Smile Than Lips and Teeth" by Carl Zimmer), with this potent passage:
Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.
Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.
The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.
In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.
But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren't. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.
So, to extend this tentative insight about smiling way way way beyond what's justifiable or known, I wonder how much of understanding requires the ability to mimic what you're trying to understand. I don't want to bring in the Dunning–Kruger Effect, since the Dunning–Kruger hypothesis generally leads to snottiness among those who cite it - except that what I find wrong with arguments that try to extend Dunning–Kruger might be instructive. One common extension of Dunning–Kruger is to say that if people are incompetent in some area then they are not likely to have the competence to even know that they're incompetent in that area. What's wrong with this extension is that I can certainly know that I'm incapable of accurately throwing a football 40-yards downfield, even though I can't throw a 40-yard pass accurately and have never even tried. Also, I understand that I don't understand very well what the interior linemen are doing on many football plays, especially running plays. I'd point out that I do know what throwing a pass is, and have a sense of what it would be like to diagram a simple play, and this knowledge provides grounds for assessing my further inability and lack of knowledge.*
But let's say, as a tentatively useful hypothesis, that understanding someone involves the ability to mimic in at least a rudimentary way what that person is doing (and understanding that you've yet to fully understand something can be a stage on the way to understanding):
--This doesn't mean you have to play an instrument or write songs to write well about music. Most music criticism isn't about how to write or play music, it's about how to use music yourself. You don't have to design, build, or repair cars in order to drive them. But driving is a skill itself.
--You can know what it's like for a girl, or a paraplegic, or a redneck, or someone else who you may never be. You can understand by analogy to things you do know, and by imagination and thought experiments etc. And by asking.
--The tentative insight I want here is that, in order to follow an argument, make sense of a reaction, and so forth, I need to be able to reconstruct the argument on my own, as it were, and to correctly imagine steps that would lead to a particular reaction. I think in the normal course people do this automatically and subconsciously and do it right. But also, when people get it wrong, a lot of them don't know how to recover, and many don't know that they've got it wrong. The pencil's between their lips, and they don't realize that this limits their perception.
--I've long been unhappy that rock critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. A big hunk of the breakdown is this right here, an inability to take in (to reconstruct) what the other person is saying. I wonder if reconstructing - recovering from misreadings - can itself be a skill that can be modeled and, in effect, internalized, so that one "naturally" starts to reconstruct arguments one has never heard before. Like mimicking facial expressions one has never previously seen.
--It also would be good to know what puts the pencil between someone's lips, what blocks the ability to mimic and reconstruct in some circumstances - and to know how to dislodge the pencil.
*Nonetheless, for all I know I may overestimate may ability to throw passes or to understand at all what's going on with interior linemen (which is what Dunning–Kruger would predict), but so what?
Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.
Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.
The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.
In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.
But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren't. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.
So, to extend this tentative insight about smiling way way way beyond what's justifiable or known, I wonder how much of understanding requires the ability to mimic what you're trying to understand. I don't want to bring in the Dunning–Kruger Effect, since the Dunning–Kruger hypothesis generally leads to snottiness among those who cite it - except that what I find wrong with arguments that try to extend Dunning–Kruger might be instructive. One common extension of Dunning–Kruger is to say that if people are incompetent in some area then they are not likely to have the competence to even know that they're incompetent in that area. What's wrong with this extension is that I can certainly know that I'm incapable of accurately throwing a football 40-yards downfield, even though I can't throw a 40-yard pass accurately and have never even tried. Also, I understand that I don't understand very well what the interior linemen are doing on many football plays, especially running plays. I'd point out that I do know what throwing a pass is, and have a sense of what it would be like to diagram a simple play, and this knowledge provides grounds for assessing my further inability and lack of knowledge.*
But let's say, as a tentatively useful hypothesis, that understanding someone involves the ability to mimic in at least a rudimentary way what that person is doing (and understanding that you've yet to fully understand something can be a stage on the way to understanding):
--This doesn't mean you have to play an instrument or write songs to write well about music. Most music criticism isn't about how to write or play music, it's about how to use music yourself. You don't have to design, build, or repair cars in order to drive them. But driving is a skill itself.
--You can know what it's like for a girl, or a paraplegic, or a redneck, or someone else who you may never be. You can understand by analogy to things you do know, and by imagination and thought experiments etc. And by asking.
--The tentative insight I want here is that, in order to follow an argument, make sense of a reaction, and so forth, I need to be able to reconstruct the argument on my own, as it were, and to correctly imagine steps that would lead to a particular reaction. I think in the normal course people do this automatically and subconsciously and do it right. But also, when people get it wrong, a lot of them don't know how to recover, and many don't know that they've got it wrong. The pencil's between their lips, and they don't realize that this limits their perception.
--I've long been unhappy that rock critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. A big hunk of the breakdown is this right here, an inability to take in (to reconstruct) what the other person is saying. I wonder if reconstructing - recovering from misreadings - can itself be a skill that can be modeled and, in effect, internalized, so that one "naturally" starts to reconstruct arguments one has never heard before. Like mimicking facial expressions one has never previously seen.
--It also would be good to know what puts the pencil between someone's lips, what blocks the ability to mimic and reconstruct in some circumstances - and to know how to dislodge the pencil.
*Nonetheless, for all I know I may overestimate may ability to throw passes or to understand at all what's going on with interior linemen (which is what Dunning–Kruger would predict), but so what?
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-25 11:57 pm (UTC)About the understanding of facial gestures, Paul Ekman (creator of the FACS system and one atlas with all possible muscle combinations of the face’s muscles), says that there are six or seven gestures that are universal, and then there are composites, some signs that are culturally specific, etc. But related to what I said before, if you do exactly the face movements, you feel the emotions. (But Ekman doesn’t talk about mirror neurons, just about facial movements and affects). So as somebody said when AKB went to New York to do a live show “they smile so much that they make you smile”. (I think the cute aesthetic, among other things, is an intensified emotional presentation, so…) And when you do some dance step that you watched in the music video for a song to get “into” it, you are doing this. And there is not much more I know about this…
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 01:42 am (UTC)(And this sort of "understanding" is limited anyway, since it involves grasping other people's thoughts and how they got to them, but doesn't evaluate whether the other people are deluded, justified etc. or what the consequences of their ideas might be, all of which is also part of understanding.)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 04:22 pm (UTC)[Dr. Galinsky] questions whether people observing a dominant smile would experience the feeling of power themselves. In fact, he points out, in such encounters, people tend to avoid eye contact, which Dr. Niedenthal says is central to her model.
So, perhaps, when you're more-or-less in an equal position with someone, you'll have the unconscious empathy/mimicry that lets you understand whether their smile is real or fake, but perhaps your unconscious needs to take another route for understanding power smiles, something that isn't quite "empathy."
This raises another problem for my not-very-good analogy. I'd call it the Hitler problem (or maybe, so as not to exemplify Godwin's law, the Adversary problem). What if you want to understand an evil adversary's thought process so as to better be able to defeat him? In some ways you need to "mimic" his evil ideas so as to have an idea what he's going to do next and why he's going to do it. Now, unlike in the smile example, mimicking his thought processes isn't the same as feeling what he's feeling (or believing what he's believing), but nonetheless you've got to have enough of a feel for his sensibility so as to have a sense of where it's going to take him even before you've seen him go there. You have to have a feel for what someone like him - like him! - would do. So it's not "What would an opponent do in this situation?" but "What would a Hitler do in this situation?"
Those criminal investigators whose specialty is profiling criminals need to have a feel for the people they're pursuing. At least they do on TV.
Back to my bad analogy: with the pencil between their lips the students were thrown back on "What would a store clerk feel in this situation?" rather than "What is this store clerk actually feeling in this situation?" Let's say that, in real life, you got to know the store clerk, and at one point a pencil was thrust between your lips, I wonder whether you'd nonetheless read her smiles correctly, be able to pick out when they're real and when they're just put on for a customer - wonder if your neurons might help here even where your lips were immobilized, based on your having had a feel for her for a while.
I think I can often read people's tone and personality well from their writing, especially if they're good writers. I wonder how that works? I mean, I don't sit around and ask myself "Now, what is this person's tone, here?" I just know. (Of course, sometimes what I "know" might be wrong.)
To pick a topic less fraught than Hitler or evil adversaries, how does one go about anticipating a colleague's or friend's or family member's faulty reasoning, and follow the logic of their misreadings? To teach well, for instance, I'd think one would need to do this.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 09:37 am (UTC)Another one is an article called “Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory” by Quentin Meillassoux, where he instead of trying to explain Deleuze through some reading of his texts and ideas makes the proposition of a thought experimient: in the same way that we say that we know what some pre-Socratic Greek thinkers ideas were even if we only know some fragments by them and some contemporary readings of them, what would happened if we only knew a couple of passages of Deleuze, knew he was a philosopher of immanence and we know from what sources he feed his thought about this (Spinoza and Bergson). So he takes this text from Deleuze where he says that in Spinoza all is immanence while Bergson only touch this state once, and uses Bergson to obtain a unit to make an immanence scale, and he takes Bergson ideas and try to modify them to see how he could connect it with Spinoza, and in the way he generates a series of pseudo-concepts that (really) are Deleuze’s own.
The third one was in one chapter of “Valences of the Dialectic” by Fredric Jameson, where he spends almost sixty pages reconstructing Paul Ricoeur’s ideas in “Time and Narrative” to use this model to go on his own way (that I didn’t found all that interesting…), so he has to explain Aristotle, or use phenomenology concepts (and I myself trying to thought what I knew about that), and so on… The funny thing is that in the latest New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan basically goes cheerleading this book through a twenty three pages article, and he goes in a hyper-specific language to show how subtle Jameson reflections are, but when he arrives to this chapter you sense that he is not on his terrain (Ricoeur reacted against structuralism and he came from a Christian background that never left), so he somehow neglects how much Jameson reflections are variations of some of Ricoeur’s readings of other people’s ideas and concentrates on the second part. I mean, is easy to spot, because Balakrishnan notes that Jameson is reading Ricoeur’s “Time, Memory and Forgetting” when Jameson mentions dozens of times in his own text that he is reading “Time and Narrative”.
In music writing you have something of this going through “what the author thought?” to understand some work. For example, the score for Manfred Werder’s “2009(5)” is this:
“There is, in a house I know well, at Remoulins, an interior courtyard, and another, at Le Grau du Roi, each one {inhabited | , adorned} by one or two fig trees”.
Francis Ponge: Comme une figue de paroles et pourquoi
So what you are going to listen through the recording is how the player interpreted this text according to his own means and what he knows about Manfred Werder’s music. Or your appreciation of Tomato’n’Pine changes if you already know Perfume or not.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 09:46 am (UTC)Or if you know that the guys that write some of the songs for Passpo are from the USA. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzExivmVOz0)
Or, once I did this silly thing of recording an improvisation only using a little sound and manipulating it through chains of delays and reverb units. The track was obviously crap, but somehow since them, I didn’t find much so called experimental rock so interesting because I knew how dumb the solutions they used were…
Or those interviews in magazines where the artist explains you what he tried to achieve, or how was the recording process, or how his or her life was. Or those songs that use a sample (or a musical quotation (check that SKE song at 0:40: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGsUSv371w) or a cult reference in their lyrics) and how depending how much you know the original source, it affects the way that you are hearing it. That is, that your emotions and reflections are influenced by the discourse available surrounding this work.
But the problem with this is how to disentangle bias from your own experiments (maybe not so gross as this but still: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rjih3hYZ9c) and what other people say. But I’m more than a bit loss in this area…
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 02:55 pm (UTC)Well, YouTube changed its embed code to make it simpler, but as of a few days ago the new embed code doesn't work in the livejournal comment threads. However, YouTube still gives you the option of using the old embed code (by ticking the last box on the options), and those do work. So let's see:
Livejournal has a policy of not letting us embed videos in threads, but it makes an exception for YouTube videos. So, for instance, I can embed dailymotion videos up in a livejournal post, but not on a livejournal comment thread.
In case YouTube stops providing it, here's what an old embed code would look like; we'd just have to insert the code for the specific video. This is for the narrow width (it's the New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis" live on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, but, for instance, if you wanted to change it to, say, Aly & AJ's "Rush," you'd put "http://www.youtube.com/v/TLKiKJ8FYoA" in place of "http://www.youtube.com/v/g7gw4VC3dnQ"):
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g7gw4VC3dnQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/g7gw4VC3dnQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>
For a video that's wider, you'd put object width="640" in place of object width="480"
Right now Japanese pop music doesn't make sense to me nearly as much as Korean music does. --By "doesn't make sense" do I mean "I don't understand" or "it doesn't appeal to me"? I'm not sure. I think there's a combination of my not being as familiar with its sounds (as I am with Korea's) and my not engaging with the sounds, not following them, and therefore not enjoying them. Given that those sounds are more rock than Korea's are, and that I've been listening to rock longer than to pretty much anything else, my inability to "hear" Japanese sounds maybe doesn't make so much sense, but there you are. Japanese pop seems to be an eclectic rock-whatever hybrid.
(Listening to more Korean pop on my own, I'm discovering that "ballads" are more pervasive than I'd realized from just listening to the top idol groups. I wonder if ballads are as pervasive in Japan.)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 04:07 pm (UTC)In Japan, I don’t know what to answer, yes there are lots of, let’s say, “hard” ballads and some are quite popular… Mika Nakashima
Otsuka Ai
but I don’t know, what I understand for ballads is more like “sad” music, while what you got in Japan almost endlessly is mixtures of melancholy with whatever thing…
the new AKB single with a sakura theme (graduation, the cherry blossom flowers signalling beauty but also that life is transitory, they expect to sell a million copies of this)
this folk tune that was quite popular last year (over 8 million views in YT), if you understand the lyrics (less or more what happens in the video) they make you cry, but not so much the music
or this kind of bland R&B half-tempo (over two million ringtones sold) (not embedding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M80XXxMKFWw)
or rock songs (Ikimono Gakari sold a million albums with their latest compilation last year, YUI also have lots of sad songs for teenagers, or this is also something that sells a lot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_lcH_2nw-o )
and of course there is enka…
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 11:47 pm (UTC)There may be some overlap between the physical blocking of unconscious mimicry and something like a "poor model" for conscious mimicry. Teachers who don't model activities and thought processes well aren't doing their students any favors. But I also imagine that the kind of very conscious training -- in both intellectual discourse and physical tasks -- required for both of your other examples (which really are a combination of reading comprehension and thoughtful abstraction on the one hand and coordination and muscle training on the other) are categorically different from the unconscious ways we "just know" when a smile is fake. Being a good thinker and good conversationalist -- like being a good writer -- requires good models and lots of practice. It isn't just something that you can do reasonably well until someone sticks a pencil in your mouth; though if there are elements of intellectual conversations that are unconscious it would be interesting to know what they are and what might improve them.
(To take a stab at this -- I would say one thing that you should consider as an intellectual model yourself is that the more information you present to someone in one go, the less easy it is for others to take that information and do something with it. I think the unconscious feeling of being overwhelmed with text, regardless of its merit, can be a pencil in the mouth. But this is the answer to a different question, which is "how can Frank model intellectual conversations better for people who don't really know how to begin in one." I'm not sure if that's really the question you're asking here, though it's a question that interests me. This is different from "how can the people who already COULD sustain an intellectual conversation be better drawn into a long-term one.")
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 06:15 am (UTC)the post -- but what I mean is it's a very specific part of a lesson that *precedes* students doing it on their own. This us also sometimes referred to as "scaffolding" though I think that term is used in too many different ways.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 04:03 am (UTC)I'm not sure that people tend to do this correctly when it comes to finding a particular argument in a complex text. The communication breakdown potential is high online (and more generally in what I'd call "conscious correspondence, which might include fanzines or emailing or writing letters) because it's an awkward combination of high-level reading comprehension and conversational back-and-forth. It's hard to both fully comprehend and also get the basic gist of a complex text (a music review or an essay, say) in the way that you can get the "gist" of what someone is asking you to respond intuitively to it (I don't need my wife to ask me directly to do the dishes -- she could say "I need to wash the lettuce" and I'd get the point intuitively).
I find that I write a precis easily because boiling text down into a series of arguments is something I do well when I'm paying attention (my own weakness is in skimming things over to find points that I want to validate, ignoring the bulk of a text for my pet sentence, as I may be doing in this very post!). But I've noticed in classes in which students need to summarize that even relatively readable pieces -- New York Times articles, say -- don't survive this process very well. Students are in fact much more likely to evaluate and make abstractions from the simplest of texts, fundamentally missing the point of summarizing. So they completely miss the basic reading comprehension part for a variety of reasons.
This isn't something that would happen in the course of normal conversation, even about a particular point in the article. Once that point has been boiled down to a more conversational (simpler) question, there might be a fruitful conversation about an idea. But ask the students to summarize that idea and it's much harder for them. In online communication we're constantly doing both -- summarizing and evaluating -- and I think that the former is almost always the source of dead ends.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 04:05 am (UTC)Role Playing
Date: 2011-01-27 04:36 pm (UTC)Here are some ways that good critics might consider improving their own empathy skillz -- empathy being a key way to want to (at least) understand someone else's argument:
(1) In dialogue with other critics, ask questions rather than answering them. What happens in practice is that one person may pose a question and then a bunch of answers from different perspectives come flooding in.
(2) Take on a persona against your innate judgment process that is informed not by your assumptions of another subject but by actual research of their writing or opinions or whatever.
(3) Write something and then attempt to argue differently -- the polar opposite if possible.
(4) Create fictional scenarios and push them as far as you can -- more (good) creative writing as (good) criticism (Tom's piece on the "CD revival" helped me think more deeply about its tangential subject, the "cassette revival").
Anyway, there are a ton of these kinds of exercises that might yield interesting results if the end effect is "begin to understand a different argument than yours." Too often what happens is that the "dialogue" that happens -- including rhetorical counterpoints, etc. -- are based only in the author's assumptions that serve only to reaffirm a predetermined point. If you're going to say X regardless of whether or not another author says Y, it doesn't really matter what Y is.