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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: 2011-01-26 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…