[From Bill Powers (2005.07.03.1133 MDT)]
Found this while looking for something else. It’s from July 31,
1991.
Best,
Bill P.
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(from Mary Powers)
A couple of comments on posts this past week:
Cat vocabulary is a little more sophisticated than "I have an
error signal, help me!" Ours says “miaow” when he wants to
come
in or go out, “MIAOW,MIAOW,MIAOUW” when he’s really pissed
off
(as when I came home part way through the meeting to feed him,
and he’d been shut up in the house for 2 days) and � here’s the
kicker � “miaow�miaow, miaow�miaow” if, and only if, he wants
to
drink running water out of the tap in the bathroom sink.
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I’m wondering how old that data is on lower class New Yorkers
speaking in the accents of upper class New Yorkers of a previous
era. As a teenager in New York in the 40’s I did hear what was
then called Brooklynese: “Toid Avenue and Toity�toid Street”
and
it was indeed the same as my upper class grandfather (1868�1950)
who said “soitainly”, etc., but if this had continued to be
the
case New Yorkers now would sound something like Margaret DuMont
in the Marx Brothers movies.
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Bruce Nevin (9108.22)
We turn up the gain on explicitness and syntactic correctness
when normal interpersonal feedback processes do not suffice to
assure us of successful control of these two sorts of
perceptions of communication. Writing is one example of this,
and this in my opinion is the reason for the differences between
literary and spoken styles.
At first I thought “neat”, and then I thought “no”.
This might
apply to an easy and informal style like Dick Francis’ �
certainly more explicit and correct than spoken language, but
something you can listen to. But I defy anyone to get much out of
being read to aloud out of Gerald Edelman’s Neural Darwinism,
which has the density of lead. Some writing is written to be
heard, and some is written to be read, and there is quite a
difference. Probably because writing is less bound by temporal
sequence � you can say “huh?” and read that paragraph again �
and
see the semicolons, and skip the subordinate clauses, and unpack
the meaning. The difference between writing and speech is not
entirely along a continuum of explicitness and correctness, but
at some point is qualitative.
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Martin Taylor and Oded Maler
It’s interesting to hear (see) the howls of protest over the idea
that society exists only in the minds of individuals. A rather
large disturbance to a rather precious reference signal,�j�
apparently. Almost as offensive as the idea of controlling
perceptions instead of commanding outputs. The question is, where
are the social control systems? Control systems exist in cells,
and in the collection of cells we call individuals, and in cells
and individuals we can specify chemical and neural mechanisms
that perform control functions. But while in a society certain
individuals may be construed as having certain control functions
(input, comparing, specifying standards, acting), the
consequences of such “functions” are communicated to other
individuals only as perceptions, not as signals from one function
to another as in an actual control system.
Are there phenomena that cannot be explained assuming only
individual hierarchical control systems? What are they?
The idea that social control does not exist is simply that it
isn’t floating there between people. It does exist, in reference
levels, in individuals, where it is constructed during learning
and growing up. The people who have not incorporated the rules of
their society into their control hierarchy are called children
(as in the Kmer Rouge example) or sociopaths.
Sometimes people who reject a certain form of social control find
enough like�minded people that they can take the risk of
challenging those who are believed to have power over them. They
may be crushed by overwhelming physical force, as in China two
years ago, or they may succeed, as in the USSR � because in
Russia, unlike China, the individuals who were supposed to use
the overwhelming physical force had reference levels about
killing their own people that were more important to them than
fear of the consequences of failing to obey orders.
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