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1. Even when a fully trained PhD academic starts littering their article with neologisms or newly coined buzzwords it usually feels unearned and annoying. 2. It's not a good sign when somebody's developed theory doesn't seem to engage at all with any existing body of research, or only engages with such research in a superficial and opportunistic manner. If you were writing a thesis on this topic one of the first things you'd be asked to conduct would be a literature review in which, after identifying the scope and topic of your research, you would describe what the current scholarly trends in the field are and locate your own ideas within the context of other researchers. You'd have to give a bit of context for your work and explain how your own thinking relates to the theories and research of others. Serious scholarship is heavily focused on plugging your own ideas into a larger framework of research, and of locating yourself within long running arguments and debates that often span decades. Its not a purely solitary endeavor where you cloister yourself away, do a lot of thinking and research in isolation (or with your internet friends) and then come down from the mountain top to share your visions. You really gotta put in the work of actually linking your thoughts with what other people have said because 1) it lets you know when you've just accidentally invented a cruder version of an existing theory and 2) it hopefully forces you to constantly test your ideas and actually introduces some amount of rigour into your work.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:54
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:34 |
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Prester Jane posted:I didn't even have a Social Security number until I was 14. I was raised in a backwards doomsday cult and my life has primarily been preoccupied with trying to overcome that. Beyond basic arithmetic and reading my actual education didn't start until I entered High School, prior to that I had been educated by the cult. I am literally a disabled schizophrenic who lives in Portland on less than $1,000 a month from my social security check, I never really had the option to go to college. If you are taking the effort to put yourself out there and solicit feedback for your ideas you're obviously ready to think about what others have written on this topic. Constructing your own entire original theory based purely on your own observation and research is a poor approach and frankly anyone who doesn't tell you that is doing you a disservice. You're presenting your ideas as a system of thought that can be used to make sense of the world so I thinks the standard I'm holding to you is perfectly fair. If you have access to a computer, the internet and a library and can write long analyses of articles or youtube videos then you're clearly capable of looking up other theories of group psychology, cognitive biases, politics, etc. and figuring out how your ideas relate to what others have said. It's not like you need to read everything ever written before forming your own opinions but if you want to be taken seriously you should demonstrate that you first took other people's ideas seriously. BrandorKP posted:For fun replace "framework" with "narrative" in Helsing's post about academia. This kind of illustrates my point. The fact academics (or anyone for that matter) use narratives and other heuristic devices to make sense of the world isn't controversial. What is supposed to make academic work distinctive is usually the fact that it's collaborative in nature - committees, peer review, conferences, etc.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:48
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Ok, that is fair enough. Let me try to think of a more constructive way to convey this advice.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:55
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Prester Jane posted:This is an excellent question, and a topic that I haven't really addressed much outside of how Narrativism spreads. So let me try and take a crack at it here. Some of your observational data is interesting and I think you have some great insights on group psychology but I gotta reiterate there's a lot of pseudo-scientific stuff going on here. Like, in addition to your grand theory of group formation and ideology you also have a fully independently formed theory on child psychology and development? Based on nothing but your own personal observations and thinking? Don't you think that's a bit of a reach? Not trying to "gatekeep" you but this thread is a bit of a hugbox and I don't think people are giving you sufficiently candid feedback on your ideas. When you are asked to clarify something it shouldn't inevitably lead to an additional new theory every time. What is the grounding here? Where does your system of ideas link up to something outside your own head?
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Oct 27, 2018 20:05
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Also to be slightly more constructive, some freely available places to start if you wanted to compare your ideas with others or get an idea of what best practices are for developing your ideas: Downloadable pdf of an Intro Sociology Testbook - provides broad overview of many topics that are similar to your interests, including group dynamics Textbooks aren't great but they can be helpful for broadly framing the issues and giving a good overview of major theoretical traditions. See, for instance, chapter six of this book and how it takes a single incident (Occupy Wall Street) and shows how different theoretical lenses would each analyze the same event. Downloadable pdf of an Intro Psychology Textbook - similarly gives broad overview and introduction to many topics of interest to you including basic primer on links between psychology and study of the brain, etc. A short youtube primer on preparing a lit review - not something I'm saying you follow rigorously, but its helpful to see what best practices are thought to be for a grad student preparing a research project PDF version of "The Reactionary Mind" by Corey Robbin - a book that tries to offer a unified psychological theory of conservatism Online copy of "When Prophecy Fails" - a famous and influential book of definite relevance to your interests. From the wiki summary: quote:When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book. The Makings of a Pro-Life Activist by Ziad W. Munson. A very important book released in 2008. It examines the dynamics of social movement mobilization using a case study of the pro-life movement. It specifically zeros in on the question of who becomes directly engaged as an activist - the answer is surprising, in that merely having strong beliefs isn't enough to motivate action. The True Believer - famous book on the nature of mass movements
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Oct 27, 2018 20:18
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Prester Jane posted:A reach to do what exactly? Be a schizophrenic posting their theories in a tiny little corner of the internet? The theories I'm proposing here aren't even necessarily their final form- the Narrativist Framework evolved tremendously over the years in response to the feedback and effort post I got from people who were willing to engage me on my own terms. I think you've got some interesting ideas and I'm encouraging you to develop them. You're more than capable of doing so, that's self evident in what you've written so far. I think its a cop out to fall back on your health issues - you're obviously intelligent and motivated enough to develop this theory in the first place, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered to comment in the first place. You're saying that one of your primary motivations for writing is figuring out how to organize and communicate your ideas. Well, part of that includes engaging with things other people have said and thought and not just posting on Something Awful! You've been at this for three years, surely your ideas are developed enough that you're able to check out some alternative approaches to the same topic.
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Oct 27, 2018 20:43
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:If other people are interested, I think it'd be fun to book-club some of these resources. I can take point on something like that. I guess the question would be which one people are most interested in.
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Oct 29, 2018 00:15
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Prester Jane posted:I fully agree, thoughts do not work in discrete units. What I am trying to get at here would be more like individual (and interchangeable) mathematical equations used in code for writing a complex computer program. Imagine a huge database of these various equations which are frequently referenced and used. I am looking for a word to describe these equations. You're moving from a descriptive theory of group psychology based on your personal experiences and observations to a theory of the mind and/or brain? When you just decide what you already believe then ask people to help you do an ad hoc rationalization of it then you're not really engaging with data. "Hey, I decided the brain works this way, can anyone help me find evidence to support the idea I already decided on?" isn't the right way to do this. Again, you have a lot of interesting personal experiences and they are definitely relevant to modern politics and political behaviour! But to be blunt you're doing cargo cult science right now and its completely undermining the actual interesting content of your ideas.
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Nov 1, 2018 17:54
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Can somebody give me an operational definition of "Narrativism" and an example of distinctively non-Narrativism behaviour for contrast?Dr. Arbitrary posted:Have you read George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things? Here thread, have a pdf of the whole book.
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Nov 9, 2018 21:08
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BrandorKP posted:Unrelated, Skex is good people Prester. But, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I don't think you are. Neither was Stanton. The abolitionists did betray the feminists, by leaving women out of the thirteenth amendment. But they weren't wrong either. It wouldn't have been adopted if they hadn't. Skex is one of the dumbest posters I've ever seen in D&D and that is saying something.
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Nov 19, 2018 00:27
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Prester Jane posted:Anyone willing to make a series of very simple images to represent the compaction cycle for me? (I have absolutely no artistic capacity whatsoever or I do it myself). But I think a simple series of stick figure type Graphics telling the story of the snowball metaphor could really do well as a Twitter thread for the compaction cycle. It'll be a weapon that could be whipped out by anyone anytime to behavior appears in social media*. You're asking for money on patreon so I really hope you're planning to compensate anyone who does work for you. You're selling it as a "weapon" but it's also building your personal brand which you are actively attempting to monetize and you need to be upfront about that.
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Feb 2, 2019 23:56
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Prester Jane posted:I was re-reading this thread and just came across this old post; I would like to state for the record that I have at this point emailed approximately 60 different College professors across a variety of universities, and I have gotten more or less bupkis in response. I have experimented with a variety of approach's/outreaxh strategies, but (so far) no one has really been willing to invest the time to read my work. A couple have responded with links to their own related works on deradicalizing/cult environments, but that's the most effort/thought I have gotten in a response do far. Based on the last time this thread was active, you also haven't invested the time to read anyone else's work. If you're reaching out to professionals and asking them to evaluate your work or help develop your ideas then you need to make some effort to ensure you don't come off like somebody cold calling physicists and offering to give them the details on your perpetual motion machine. At the risk of being repetitive: part of developing a theory is actually comparing your ideas against the theories other people have developed. Figuring out where there's overlap, where you're saying something new or different, etc. Those techniques were literally developed as best practices over the centuries to try and resist some of the very psychological tendencies that you're critiquing.
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Jun 21, 2019 15:31
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I have seen other people offer a more or less identical analysis of Q Annon without having to use any special or self referential jargon. And your hypothesizing about how only Russian intelligence could be behind such a scheme crosses over into outright nonsense. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 9, 2019 23:31
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Maybe that last post was too harsh on my part but Prester I gotta point out that you're equally brutal in your dealings with the D&D brainworms caucus so I don't exactly feel like I'm punching below the belt here. Also I find it tiresome that you more or less respond to all my posts as trolls when one of my first forays into this thread was to offer up an entire annotated bibliography of suggested sources. You're putting your ideas out in to the world, proposing them as solutions to some of our most serious political problems. You're going to get harsh feedback. The most I guess I can offer is that while I can get a bit caught up in myself and act like an rear end in a top hat sometimes, I am genuinely trying to give you helpful feedback even if the format its coming in is abrasive. I think you've got a lot of people here giving you positive feedback and encouragement, maybe there needs to be room for at least one person with a much harsher tone. How are you ever going to have confidence in your theory if it hasn't been attacked harshly and repeatedly from every angle? Prester Jane posted:This is... literally the thread specifically for developing my jargon? What exactly is your objection here? It looks like you're (as per usual) just trying to pick a fight and be passive-aggressively insulting. When I say that your writing is self-referential I mean that it almost exclusively refers back to itself instead of building connections with other ideas, arguments, theories, etc. rather than engaging with outside literature. Ideally there's going to be a balance between new theoretical terms and pre-existing concepts that ground your ideas. Like, take your idea of "narrative dysphoria". How is that similar to or different from cognitive dissonance? Why was a new word necessary? How is it related to other forms of dysphoria? For instance, the idea of "the Nostradamus Hustle" is a clever and useful term for a phenomenon that I've seen many times before but for which I've never seen such an accurate and succinct label. The wording is clever and evocative and helpfully communicates the concept. That's an example of a term I could easily see myself borrowing and re-using. It's a neologism that'd make a career academic jealous. I don't agree with you that its evidence for a high level conspiracy and would actually argue that crowd sourced and non-directed Nostradamus Hustles are extremely common and that there's simply no need to invoke government intelligence agencies to explain something that looks like it happened organically, but either way I think the term itself is golden. Some of your other concepts like "narrativist" I'm more skeptical of. I can sort of intuit what you're getting at but the concept feels fuzzy and underdefined and I have never had a clear sense of whether its even possible for anyone to not be a narrativist. It would be helpful for me as a reader if you were spending more time defining such a crucial concept and explaining how it is similar or different to other theories of psychology. Whats the difference between an authoritarian and a narrativist? etc. Is narrativism a yes/no quality or something that happens on a spectrum? quote:Why do you insist on arguing in bad faith? Those posts literally state that Russian intelligence is the "most likely culprit". )That said- since I wrote those posts in March of 2018 a fair amount of evidence has come out that I feel suppports my case.) It's now public record that pizzagate and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory where the products of Russian psyops. It doesn't seem so unreasonable to me that Qanon, a conspiracy theory that exists in the same conceptual universe as pizzagate/Seth Rich conspiracy theory+were promulgated through the same channels by many of the same actors, was also initiated by Russian intelligence as a psyop. No, that hasn't been proven, and yes it does seem unreasonable. Given everything we know about the right and American culture, given the example of guys like Vince Foster, I just don't get how anyone could seriously buy into the idea that it took a Russian state sponsored disinformation campaign to generate a conspiracy around Seth Rich. There's a massive rightwing infrastructure dedicated to propagating these ideas and a huge pre-existing conspiracy literature specifically focused on the Clinton's. You don't need Russia-gate to explain how conspiracies like this take hold when House of Cards is one of the most popular political dramas of the last decade! The emergence of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory was more or less inevitable from the moment he was shot in the back. Yeah places like RT and Sputnik signal boosted those conspiracies but it really strains credulity to think they deserve the primary blame or focus here when the Seth Rich poo poo was only the latest in a very long line. quote:Further, since writing all of that material March of 2018, qanon adherence have behaved more or less as my framework predicts they would. A fair number of them have become violent and committed Lone Wolf attacks, and a significant number of individuals who were qanon adherents at one point or another have radicalized and have carried that radicalization forward into other right-wing spheres. People were able to anticipate this without reference to your theory though. It's not enough to point out that your theory could match the data. The test of a theory is its parsimony, its scope, its accuracy and its falsifiablity (more on this below), all of which have to be measured relative to other explanations. I'll elaborate on this in a separate post. McGlockenshire posted:Here, maybe you missed the link at the very top of the post that explains that Russian intelligence is literally behind a cornerstone of the entire loving thing I read it and was instantly reminded of the bad old days of the Russiagate thread in D&D and how otherwise sensible people just yearn to believe this stuff.
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Jul 10, 2019 19:48
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So in the spirit of explaining what I'm trying to get at here's a basic breakdown of the role of theory in social science. This is a bit biased toward more quantitative approaches but is still very valuable. Let me say immediately that academic knoweldge and procedures are not inherently more legitimate than other ways of knowing. There's a lot of ivory tower bullshit in the academy and a lot of gate keeping and careerism. I'm really not saying you should put all your ideas on hold and nevero pen your mouth unless you've done years of school. There are some strengths and advantages to developing your ideas outside the academic stranglehold. But! That doesn't mean academia is irrelevant or that all its techniques and procedures should be tossed into the garbage. And when you strip away the pretensions that surround a lot of academia, most of the basic rules, such as those below, are actually pretty helpful for working through the details of a complicated idea. Theory in Social Science posted:I. What is a theory? Obviously this is stuff is aspirational - its not like this could all be done over night. But rather than just continuing to add more invented terminology and crawling through random news stories guided by your confirmation bias I implore you to think about spending more time rigorously defining the terms you've already got and working on precisely explaining how they fit together. Or at least, that'd be my advice, take it or leave it. Also, regarding anyone still freaking out about the Internet Research Agency I really encourage them to read this article by one of the first journalists to draw attention to them.
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Jul 10, 2019 19:59
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One second thought, nevermind.
Helsing has issued a correction as of 18:04 on Aug 9, 2019 |
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Aug 9, 2019 17:54
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It feels like a lot of people here want to have their cake and eat it too. If you're going to argue that Narrativism is a predictive theory that can be applied to explain current social phenomena better than other theories then you need a better response to well criticism than "stop trying to gatekeep me." If this was a thread about one person relating their personal experiences and anecdotal observations about how group behaviour and mental health interact then I think that would be a different kettle of fish. But instead we're getting a bunch of ideas that are expressly designed to look like a rigorous academic theory of group psychology. Let's not fool ourselves: you put your ideas in this particular format because you want to borrow some of the prestige that rigorous academic models inherently have. When you assign special terminology and develop a system of thought and claim it all relates together in a specific way you're relying on the fact that your readers have been taught to view these as signs of rigor and predictive power. If you present a big theory of everything that is set up to more or less mimic an academic theory of group psychology then guess what? You're going to get people critiquing your ideas ion the same terms that you presented them. Complaining about this as "gate keeping" is ridiculous.
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Aug 31, 2019 18:49
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Dumb Lowtax posted:Nobody is arguing that! Nowhere above did we say that we want to challenge an academic field. That's all you. That's projection of what I can only assume is your D&D style urge to search for the perfectly optimal lesson that academics can use to heal the unwashed, and assuming that we want that too instead of something much more practical. The people ITT advocate for awareness of a few helpful concepts, not overhauling academia for gently caress's sake. If you're arguing based on how Prester stated that she wanted her theories to have academic rigor someday, and if you're saying that she went too far with it, then congratulations, you are arguing with a schizophrenic on the internet while everyone else patiently waits for you to stop. My argument is simply that if PJ isn't trying to develop a rigorous academic theory then she should stop using the format of a rigorous academic theory to present and explain her ideas. That's not because I think it is somehow disrespectful to academics or something dumb like that - academia has a lot of problems and is hardly the only legitimate form of knowledge, in fact sometimes it's completely ill suited for the task at hand - the reason I am bringing this up is because I think that reveals an underlying contradiction in how this thread is approaching its topic. The way you format your ideas has a lot of influence over how you end up using those ideas in real life. If you have what amounts to a collection of interesting anecdotes but you insist on arranging them into a predictive theory then this is not good. That's not because anecdotal observations are bad - they are some powerful sometimes and worth considering. But they should not be misrepresented as something different than what they are. Jazerus posted:if the disagreements were, in fact, on the same terms as presented, that would be such a vast improvement over the status quo that nobody would be complaining at all. My intention is not to accuse people of dishonesty. I'm just trying to point out that the way knowledge is organized matters just as much as the knowledge itself, and failure to acknowledge that has a cost. I've tried to be clear that I think there's plenty of merits to PJ's ideas and lots of stuff worth talking about. My concern is the approach taken here is actually inhibiting a good discussion instead of encouraging one.
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Aug 31, 2019 19:41
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Jazerus posted:if these folks were simply disagreeing there would not be a problem. What exactly is your objection to how I'm engaging with this thread?
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Aug 31, 2019 20:09
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:34 |
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This article is now almost a decade old:quote:Is America 'Yearning for Fascism'?
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Sep 30, 2019 20:01
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