On page 262 of The Discipling of Mytra, I paraphrase some material from John Piper’s What’s the Difference?

Before publication I kept wondering how to acknowledge the wording I had borrowed from Piper. Novels don’t have footnotes, after all. Then I forgot about the issue entirely. Only after publication did I remember that I had never found a solution. So unfortunately in the current edition there is no attribution given to Piper for his very helpful teaching on gender. This blog will have to do for now.

I want to fix this in the next printing. My question is how? Do I mention Piper’s work in the introduction? On the acknowledgements page? Somewhere else? Any advice you can give would be much appreciated.

Once again, science reminds us that many of our assumptions are completely wrong, even when we think we have evidence to support us.  NASA reports that its LCROSS probe has discovered, not a little bit, but a significant amount of water on the moon.  It amounts to about 24 gallons in the 20-meter-wide crater and immediate environs that the scientists explored.

Now we’ve been to the moon–four times, and eight men have spent many hours gathering samples of rock and dust that have been analyzed for 40 years, and nothing in those samples apparently led anyone to believe that more than a few molecules of water could be buried in the moon.  But, then, aliens probing our Pacific Ocean would have no basis on which to predict Las Vegas.  Our astronauts trod a relatively narrow belt around the moon’s middle, whereas the beds of water ice are most obvious at the moon’s south pole.

The lesson from all this is that communicators really need to explore their assumptions and not reach conclusions based on hard, fast–but scope-limited–evidence.  The justice system has discovered this fact–why are so many convicted “murderers” being released on DNA evidence?  Medical researchers have discovered this fact–why are so many opinions about so many diseases changing as the scope of medical research widens?  We communicators need to realize it too.  So good advise would be to:

• Always obtain–and question–multiple sources for claims by businesses, government officials, scientists or others.
• Report the scope of evidence on which a conclusion is based (was it tested with 25 males over the age of 80, or 5,000 women aged 22 to 63?)
• Identify “who says so.”  My old newsroom boss used to toss copy back to me, declaring, “I’m not going to say that.”  He wanted me to attribute the information to its source.
• Always try to gather opinions and/or quotes from those on the other side of an issue.  Don’t be hasty in considering those with seemingly outlandish opinions as nut cases.  They may be lunar rocket scientists.

Last year LugRadio wrapped up after five seasons, over 2million downloads and six live events. For over a year Tony Whitmore from the ubuntu-uk Podcast has been working on a documentary chronicling the history of the show, and packed with interviews, behind-the-scenes footage of how the show was planned, the studio, LugRadio Live USA and more. He premiered the hour-long documentary at LugRadio Live 2009 to resounding applause and acclaim, and it is now available online, and freely available under a Creative Commons License.

“Don’t Listen Alone: author: Tony Whitmore License: CC-BY-SA
http://ia341328.us.archive.org/2/items/Dont_Listen_Alone/dont_listen_alone.ogv

According to the medical model hallucinations and delusions are separate symptoms of mental disorder. However this is not the only way to think about them. Many people argue that hallucinations are a response to stress and that delusions are a way to make sense of perceptions or to protect our self esteem when the world seems to contradict our cherished beliefs.

This model suggests that both hallucinations and delusions are actually thoughts just like any other – albeit in an unusual form.

That’s why auditory hallucinations are mood congruent. Mood congruent means that what the voices say matches the mood of the voice-hearer. So when we’re sad the voices tell us upsetting things about ourselves or characterise hopelessness and helplessness. They match our mood just as any other thoughts do – and they can be dismissed just as other thoughts can.

Delusions are an attempt to make sense of the experiences we have. So if the voices talk about secret things it seems reasonable to believe that they belong to telepathic beings simply because they know what we’re thinking.

Since telepathic beings aren’t common in everyday life we then have to come up with a context for them – aliens from a distant galaxy might be telepathic. Ergo – the voices must belong to aliens.

The prodrome and the delusional mood

So the ‘holy grail’ of formulation is to capture the ‘delusional mood’. This is the mood of the person when the voices first began. Often the first hallucination is such a profound experience that people never forget it. If you can discover what was happening at the time of the first voice, what it said, how the person felt you might have found the key to the entire formulation. You might also have found the key to recovery.

Disempowering voices

Professor Marius Romme and his partner Sondra Escher began exploring voice-hearing following a conversation with voice-hearer, Patsy Hagen in Holland in the early 1980s. Their subsequent research has identified three ‘top tips’ for taking the power out of voices.

They found that those voice-hearers who did not report problems because of their voices used the following strategies:

1                    Attribution – attributing the voices to something benign or controllable (such as your own thoughts) is the most effective way of dealing with them. Many voice-hearers use this strategy and by attributing the voice to their own thinking they are able to take control of them just as they would with any other type of thought.

2                    Social rank – If you perceive the voices to belong to someone or something less powerful than you are then you can ignore or dismiss what they say without fear.

3                    Systems theory – The part of the system with the most choices has the most control. The voices may tell people what to do but they have no power over how or when it is done.

By Dena T. Smith

In elections, we determine who to vote for via a number of factors: party affiliation, the economy, the character of the candidate, advertising, etc. It’s a complicated process. One key force in determining the outcome of elections is who is attributed responsibility for both the pitfalls and promise of a given state of the nation, state, city or even district.   The process of attribution, generally explored by social psychologists, and usually used to describe blame for negative events, plays a key role in our voting practices, especially where incumbents are concerned. For instance, the incumbent party is less likely to maintain dominance when the economy is bad because constituents are likely to blame said faction for economic woes. The heated races in Virginia, New Jersey and upstate New York taking place today will, in their aftermath, be prime examples of attributing blame to candidates based on the party that is nationally dominant. President Obama’s campaigning for Jon Corzine is no coincidence in a year where democrats desperately want to maintain their majority, but fear that people will attribute the blame for the still sluggish economy to the party itself. Democrats are likely also concerned that things like the lack of movement on health care and the increasing disappointment with how the war in Afghanistan is being handled may even cause some conservative democrats to vote against the party – to attribute the blame for these situations to the various Democratic Candidates running today, even though they have had nothing to do with these decisions. Finally, attribution, in this case, might work in the opposite direction; if democrats lose offices today, those losses will likely be attributed to failures of the Obama administration, thereby assigning blame to the President for a loss of faith in democratic leadership.  Conservatives are hoping that voters blame Democrats for such things as the high rate of unemployment and that this attribution will lead them to regain a little bit of the power lost in January.

Attribution affects how we react towards our own party and the opposition. For instance, in today’s Mayoral election in New York City, Democrats must ask themselves who to blame for the high cost of living that has only increased over the last eight years. If it’s Michael Bloomberg, things work out quite neatly – blame befalls the candidate of the opposite party. However, as most New Yorkers are, democrats are also concerned with, for example, problems in the public education system and with crime, both of which were abated during the last eight years.  Do Democrats vote for their own party’s candidate, Bill Thompson, even though they attribute improvements to the current Mayor? We’ll find out. Voting is obviously more complicated than playing the blame game, as these attributions only take us so far – in the end, there are many other, perhaps more important factors at play, but it is important to note the power that attributing blame to an individual, or in this case, a political party, can have on the outcome of elections. Think about the big questions asked in the last Presidential race: Who was responsible for the war in Iraq ? (Hillary Clinton lost major points with her party for this), Who was responsible for the economy’s collapse? (Republicans lost major points with the majority of Americans for this), Who was responsible for the health care crisis, who for the the overcrowded prisons, the crumbling education system, etc.? Ultimately, who we attribute blame for these issues is often beyond “real” responsibility – it also has a great deal to do with our perceptions of responsibility. But in either case, where we place the blame for (usually the bad, but also the good) events certainly looms large in elections.

3 Contests on Election Day Could Signal Political Winds

Attribution of responsibility

Attribution Theories

Author: threethirty Member 0 NumberedHumanIndustries
More info: http://numberedhumanindustries.com/members.html

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY)
More Info: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

G’day kids, I recently found out that no one trusts you, not your teachers, not your principals, not your parents…
but hey I do. Before you start wondering “So who is this bloke?” I’m one of those pain in the butt hippie types your parents don’t want you talking to, and why am I doing this? Because I’m 24 years old, in one year no one should trust me (never trust anyone over the age of 25) so I had better get this in now.

Ok so Lenovo and the Department of Education and Training provided laptop “personal” computers to you guys and your teachers. I put personal in quotes because that’s crap. They are not personal computers they are personnel computers, as in someone else has control over them. They have installed some of the same type of software on there that if it was put there under any other circumstance it would be called “Spyware”. This is not good no matter what they tell
you.

Two examples of the “innovative technologies” introduced by Lenovo with the IdeaPad S10e (which you all received) include “advanced network security and remote manageability tools”. Advanced network security tools prevent users (that’s you kids) from accessing unauthorized internet content and control access to NSW DET networks. This means not only can they keep you off of Myspace and Facebook, but they can watch what sites you are allowed to go to.

Remote manageability tools allow NSW DET to remotely monitor and manage the devices on demand, wherever they are located, maximizing their efficiency and effectiveness. This means that even when you are at home the DET can spy on you, fun huh?

The Lenovo IdeaPad S10e features ground breaking theft protection features such as hardware level reporting, retrieval and remote disabling functions and RFID tagging. The Lenovo IdeaPad S10e presents a zero value theft proposition thereby removing any incentive for them to be stolen and protecting the students and teachers that use them. This is all marketing speak, what it really means is that they can break your new cool laptop and RFID is a tracking system created by the manufacturing industry to track pallets. Guess what kids you are not people, you are property. And these are not features that will keep you safe. Anyone can track you with $100USD (yeah I’m an American) worth the hardware that you can buy online. The only way I know of to kill a RFID is to microwave it… and that’s a bad idea, it will kill the laptop and get you in heaps of trouble. But I do know what you can do. If you are worried about someone tracking you on your way to and from school and stuff like that, wrap the whole laptop in Aluminium Foil it will block all of the signals going in or out.

There is this thing called Linux. It runs on cellphones, servers, computers, all kinds of stuff. It also doesn’t have to be installed on your laptop to be able to use it. You can install it on a USB “thumb” drive, which is pretty cool.

If you go to http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ it will tell you how to install it on your thumbdrive. Yeah it
looks a little hard but I promise it isn’t, just follow the instructions and it will work. Just make sure you
download the Windows version of unetbootin. In unetbootin there are several different kinds (also known as distributions) of Linux listed. I have had great success with Ubuntu and Fedora, but any of the ones listed should be good also.

What this will do is let you use the computer without letting the DET spy on you, and wont mess up the computer so while you are at school you can do all the stuff they want you too with out getting in trouble. This works because it uses the thumbdrive as a harddrive so the bigger the space on the thumbdrive the more stuff you can install and store on there!

If you want some more tips and ideas on how to be a pain in the butt with technology have a look at Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother which you can get for free here http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

Think about this.
Companies can operate in silos. They have people who can;

1. Generate demand and market your product (some good, some bad)
2. Know Digital Marketing inside out – Some with an over technical bias and no creativity and commercial acumen. Some with an abundance of client skills, commercial acumen, but with little industry and technical knowledge.
3. Know the industry, verticals, competitive landscape, and each client’s needs in depth

Very few can combine all 3 and mirror and match there organizational, business, and revenue model to that of the market they operate in and with their clients.

I think an SEO analogy is in order….

Professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT disciplines. SEO specialists win business as they have a unique blend/blend of talent and understanding of the 3 disciplines. This is why good SEO agencies do so well when pitching against a purely technological or a purely sales/black hat type of organization.

Having an innovative and unique approach to aligning your organization to market conditions is similar. Many companies have either the sales and marketing experience, many have digital or search knowledge, and many have the technological and analytical experience. Very few have a combination of all these and no one to ensure all departments work in perfect synergy.

This leads to what I call ‘planned execution’.

To succeed ‘team selling is vital’. Just like ‘click attribution’

“How many companies internally battle over credit, commissions, and recognition even before you enter a ‘pitch battle’?
“How many companies lose pitches (ohh a close second!) because they did not listen to client. Hence they did not involve the right people in the pitch process, they put the wrong people in a pitch at the wrong time, and they did not get a balance between showing their technical, business acumen and market knowledge, understanding the client, and understanding the commercials?”

“What would you say if I advised your company to re-evaluate your internal KPI’s, sales commission plans, and pitch strategy and use ‘hubs of expertise’ to convert big business. The rewards are shared across all business, marketing, and technical disciplines involved?”
“How many companies have a Chief Revenue officer who can offer that vital ‘assist’, constantly maintain revenue focus and ensure all revenue streams rise?”

Please..

Think about your company’s revenue attribution model
Think about what areas of weaknesses you can improve on. Where are the broken links. How do you fix them.
Plan for changes in your working environment, skill gaps, resources shortgages, staff turnover. Who plug’s the gaps?
Utilize your organizational talent just like you would a clients marketing budget.

Far too many companies have internal debate that is counter productive. Experts v Crowds, technical v sales, sales v marketing. What they fail to realise is that each has his own ‘domain’ of specialism and are all part if the glue that binds successful company growth.

FOCUS: RESULTS MARKETING

Welcome to “Patient Critical: Madison Avenue,” where new and legacy media vehicles struggle to capture declining advertising dollars, deliver ROI and answer the question: What parts of the marketing budget—which mediums—are worth saving?

Digital media may have set the bar for sales-attribution reporting, but today, that’s not enough. Delivering R.O.I. requires an understanding of how all mediums work together and how spends should shift holistically to achieve the greatest net impact for a client. In our agency, we refer to that process as C.P.R.O.I.

C.P.R.O.I (Cross Platform Return on Investment) is the next generation of results, driven by real-time, digitally-delivered, comprehensive data that can close the sales loop across platforms. The only way for an agency to effectively diagnose a client’s marketplace challenges, re-allocate dollars to where they work best and deliver brand saving C.P.R.O.I. is to invest in the most effective data tools available and pair them with an analytics team whose expertise spans all media platforms.

At Mercury Media, we employ the best tools across brand, digital and direct response advertising to inform our media spends and maximize results. We start with our proprietary database of client results and DRTV-specific tools such as CORE and Catalyst, add everything from traditional syndicated research to digital planning, buying, reporting and optimization tools, then add a team of analysts who are focused on finding a cure for our clients’ performance ails. We have also developed partnerships with leading data analysis companies to “pull it all together.” These tools, people and partners drive results.

Digital marketing may have created the appetite for data-driven media allocation but, today, digital-only performance tracking isn’t enough. Those who refuse to look beyond their medium of comfort and think holistically should not be surprised when their clients seek a second opinion. It is the marketers who can deliver critical C.P.R.O.I to breathe new life into their client’s brand who will be paged when crisis strikes.

Ken Dec is SVP of Business Development for Mercury Media where he is responsible for growing Mercury Media’s roster of clients and introducing existing clients to the agency’s full array of multi-platform, measured media solutions.  A 25-year marketing veteran, Dec has helped grow top brands including Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Pfizer, Vonage, Citigroup, IBM, Bose, Nationwide and Nissan.  As a result of his strategic leadership, several of Dec’s client campaigns have been awarded top industry honors, including Cannes, Effies, Caples and HSMAI awards.

Contact him at kdec@mercurymedia.com

This article appeared in the October 26, 2009 edition of DM News

newsflash! excitement! suspense! (well, i’m excited, but that’s probably it).

the wonderful SphynxCatVP, who runs the excellent SphynxCat’s Real Vampires Support Website, has included my post on types of donors in her article library. i am well chuffed, as you might imagine; this is the first time (to my knowledge) that one of my articles has left my site, to be included in one of the big reference sites of the community. it feels really good to be appreciated like this.

which reminds me that i need to put up my copyright notice. unless otherwise specified, i use a creative commons license with the following options: attribution, non-commercial, share-alike. that means that you may copy content from this blog as long as you a) attribute it to me (by name and with a link back to the site), b) don’t use it commercially (if in doubt, ask), and c) apply the same license to any copies or derivative works you make of it. if you are in doubt about whether you can use my content, or would like additional rights, ask me.*

also, comments are of course copyright their respective authors, and a few texts remain all rights reserved (and are marked as such).

*leave a comment in an appropriate place, or email me at ladydiss74 [at] gmail [dot] com. include [being a swan] (including the square brackets) in the subject line, otherwise you risk falling into my spam filter and being deleted automatically.

Originally posted on Sociology Lens:

By HopeForTheDismalScience  (William P Bell)

A fortnight ago, I discussed how neoclassical economics is theoretically and philosophical flawed and how it has become entrenched in our political systems via university economics departments indoctrinating undergraduates with the neoclassical ideology.  This article discusses how the indoctrination produces a world view which causes confusion over the role of government and the concept of freedom of choice. Additionally, provides an economic perspective on  “Weighing the blame for illness: biology versus personal responsibility” by Dena T. Smith.

One of the axioms in neoclassical economics is that individuals are utility maximising agents who know their own preferences and have constant tastes, unlimited cognitive ability and access to all the relevant information.  These utility maximising assumptions are obviously incorrect.  However neoclassical economics uses these assumptions to derive the ‘Fundamental Theorems of Welfare’.  Simply, individuals without government interference make the optimal decisions for themselves and via the invisible hand for the whole economy.  It is optimal in the sense that you cannot make somebody better off without making somebody else worse off.

Among other issues, behavioural economics addresses self-control problems, which range from the fairly minor, such as watching too much TV, to significant social problems, such as obesity, smoking, drinking, drug-taking, gambling, speeding, and using too much credit and the inability to save.  These self-control problems are sufficient to prove the ‘Fundamental Theorems of Welfare’ is invalid without the need to address all the other anomalies of the utility maximising assumptions.

Some of the controls that governments introduce to ameliorate for self control problems infringe on the freedom of choice but they are uncontroversial for example breath testing for drink drivers, safety belts and the sale and advertising of alcohol and tobacco.  Legislation to deal with these self control problems can be viewed from addressing the supply side or demand side.  Examples of legislation affecting the supply side are reducing the trading hours of alcohol retailers or restricting the number of alcohol suppliers.  Legislation that affects the demand side includes: education, promoting alcoholics anonymous and constraints on advertising.  Obviously the alcohol industry fights any restrictions on advertising.

The ultimate supply side constraint on alcohol was the prohibition in the USA, which had the effect of spawning organised crime and police corruption.  The “war on drug” is another supply side effort that has unsurprisingly spawned more organised crime and police corruption.  An additional result of the “war on drugs” is the high price of drugs,  which requires drug users to steal and recruit more users to sell drugs to fund their own habit.  The latter produces pyramid marketing. The alternative approach is to legislate on the demand side by decriminalising the drugs and treating drug addiction as a disease for example in Switzerland, Portugal and Holland.

An alternative to legislation is taking legal action against the offending company.  If you get fat from eating at MacDonald’s or get lung cancer from smoking, sue them.  While this litigious approach is lucrative for the legal system, it is more akin to an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff with the complainants allowed to buy expensive lotto tickets.  Surely it is better to prevent the population becoming obese or contracting lung cancer.

While not claiming that all self-control problems can be treated identically, there are some commonalities.  The demand side legislation on restricting advertising, providing education and treatment appears more appropriate for self-control problems than criminalising the problems, which ensues more problems.  The demand side approach acknowledges the findings of behavioural economics that people are fallible and slants the environment to help people make a better choice. The supply side approach tries to remove freedom of choice.  From a neoclassical perspective, people are utility maximising agents, so ought not to make bad choices.  If they fail to maximise utility, they are just bad or faulty people and should be punished.

“Methods of Understanding” will get what you need done in your business.

No matter if it is working to build a “Company Culture”, or becoming a sales “Rain Maker”, or “Marketing Positioner” of the next Widget… you will get further if you apply the toolkit of how individuals use “Methods to Understand”.

You may know Sales Methodologies, but the “Rain Maker” applies Systems of Understanding. Most natural “Rain Makers” unknowingly identify how others are using these various types of Understanding Methods, they just identify these throughout all aspects of their lives… without even knowing they are using them. By identifying what individuals use when they try to understand can enlighten the situation. 

WARNING! This is not for everyone. Some people are so locked into their individual method that if you are a “hammer” everything looks like a “nail”! The “Rain Maker”, the “Corporate Motivator”, and the  ”Customer Requirement Aggregator” ” all must identify which “Methods of Understanding” is being used and how to adapt to it. 

We all instinctively lean toward some of these approaches rather than others, but the key to applying these principles  is to internalize the different constructs so we can better communicate. The different types are:

• Attribution – we need to attribute cause, that supports our ego.
• Constructivism – we use constructs as perceptual categories.
• Framing – mental combinations that affect perception.
• Schema - structure to organize and interpret the world.
• Personal Constructs - constructs represent understanding.
• Symbolic Interaction  - we derive meaning around symbols.
• Objectification –  we simplify complex things into concrete images.
• Story Models – We piece together complex situations into stories to build understanding.

Lets first cover the first four in this article and try to identify after reading how you and others are using them in your professional and personal life.

Attribution

We all have a need to explain the world, both to ourselves and to other people, attributing cause to the events around us. This gives us a greater sense of control. When explaining behaviour, it can affect the standing of people within a group (especially ourselves).

When another person has erred, we will often use internal attribution, saying it is due to internal factors. When we have erred, we will more likely use external attribution, attributing causes to situational factors rather than blaming ourselves. We will take credit, due to the good business skills that were applied. And vice versa. We will attribute the successes of competitive rivals to external ‘advantages’. 

When a football team wins, supporters say ‘we won’. But when the team loses, the supporters say ‘they lost’. Our attributions are also significantly driven by our emotional and motivational drives. Blaming other people and avoiding personal recrimination is a very real self-serving attributions. We will also make attributions to defend what we perceive as attacks. We will point to injustice in an unfair world. 

In practice, we often tend to go through a two-step process, where we start with an automatic internal attribution, followed by a slower consideration of whether an external attribution is more appropriate. Key to this is, if we are hurrying or are distracted, we may not get to this second step. This makes internal attribution more likely than external attribution.
Example of Use: I have no support and no budget there for I cannot do a good job.

Using it: Beware of being a complainer (i.e. making internal attributions about the situation). Also beware of making excuses (external attributions) that lead you to repeat mistakes and leads to Cognitive Dissonance in others when they are making internal attributions about you.

Defending: Watch out for people making untrue attributions.

Constructivism

We try to make sense of the world by making use of constructs, which are perceptual categories that we use when evaluating things.

People who have many different and abstract constructs have greater flexibility in understanding the world and are cognitively complex, whilst others are cognitively simple. Cognitively complex people are better able to accept both complex and inconsistent messages. They also have a greater need to understand things and will question deeply anything that is new to them. However, once persuaded, they stay persuaded and are less likely to change their minds as their new constructs will support the argument.

Example: Some people have a construct about being fat that says fat people are lazy and greedy. Others may perceive it as a medical condition. 

Using it: Help cognitively complex people to build new constructs that support your argument. Do not bother with this detail for the cognitively simple.

Defending: Do not let others take charge when building new constructs.

Framing

A frame is the combination of beliefs, values, attitudes, mental models, and so on which we use to perceive a situation. We effectively look through this frame in the way we would look through tinted spectacles. The frame significantly effects how we infer meaning and hence understand the situation.

Example: I see a holiday in the hills as an opportunity for outdoor exercise. My friend sees is as a chance for a quiet read. My son sees it as a long period of boredom.

Using it: Change elements of a person’s frame (reframing) and hence how they view the world). This is a powerful persuasive technique. 

Being able to see things through many frames yourself gives you a broader perspective and able to understand more of how others think.

Defending: When people ask you to look at something from another viewpoint, be aware that there are many viewpoints, many of which are valid and legitimate. 

Schema

A schema is a mental structure

Schemas are also self-sustaining, and will persist even in the face of disconfirming evidence. This is because if something does not match the schema, such as evidence against it, it is ignored. Some schema are easier to change than others, and some people are more open about changing any of their schemas than other people. Schemas are also known as mental models, concepts, mental representations and knowledge structures(although definitions are different–for example some define mental models as modeling cause-effect only).

Schemas affect what we notice, how we interpret things and how we make decisions and act. They act like filters, accentuating and downplaying various elements. We use them to classify things, such as when we ‘pigeon-hole’ people. They also help us forecast, predicting what will happen. We even remember and recall things via schemas, using them to ‘encode’ memories.

Schemas have inferences and appear very often in the attribution of cause. The multiple necessary cause schema is one where we require at least two causes before a ‘fit’ to the schema is declared. Schemas are often shared within cultures, allowing short-cut communications. Every word is, in effect, a schema, as when you read it you receive a package of additional inferred information.

We tend to have favourite schema which we use often. When interpreting the world, we will try to use these first, going on to others if they do not sufficiently fit. 

Example: Some people dislike police because they have a schema of police as people who perceive everyone as guilty until proven innocent. Other people feel safe around police as their schemas are more about police as brave protectors. 

Using it: Find people’s schemas around the area of interest, then either create trust by utilizing their schema or reframe to change their schema.

Defending: Become more self-aware, knowing your own schemas and why there are useful for you. When people try to change them, you can then more rationally understand whether your or their schemas are better.

This is a lot to absorbs,  so look for these in your every day business or personal life and check back for the second part of this Article after I try this myself!

Crowded community colleges

Although Hatchet reporters only need a minimum of three sources for their article, it is better to obtain information and quotes from more individuals. The San Jose Mercury News reporter, Lisa Krieger, quoted three sources in the linked article, and she most likely obtained facts from additional sources. She directly quoted Peter Aguilar, a 33-year-old student; Becky Bartindale, the DeAnza Foothill College District spokeswoman; and DeAnza president Brian Murphy. She also mentions Filippo Markolefas, another student. He and Aguilar were asked which classes they needed to take. Bartindale gave the reporter her opinion on how she felt in the situation of overcrowding, whereas Murphy spoke about “an unprecedented level of student demand.”

It is clear that Krieger not only asked for their opinions, but she also inquired about statistics, where students planned to attend after DeAnza, etc. She may have even talked to other sources for such information. She thought about who would be the best person to talk to about the number of students on the college waiting list, and someone else about budget cuts and school funds.

Krieger provided a satisfactory amount of information to the reader regarding the different kind of people on the waiting list and why they are there. However, it would also be interesting if she asked the school’s president if he will allow those thousands of students on the waiting list to eventually obtain their education. If not, how else will students complete remedial and general education classes? Will they have to apply to another college? Will they have to wait until the next quarter or semester? Even though reporters must have maximum number of words to write, it is important to consider such information.

By HopeForTheDismalScience                                                                                        (William P Bell)

A fortnight ago, I discussed how neoclassical economics is theoretically and philosophical flawed and how it has become entrenched in our political systems via university economics departments indoctrinating undergraduates with the neoclassical ideology.  This article discusses how the indoctrination produces a world view which causes confusion over the role of government and the concept of freedom of choice. Additionally, provides an economic perspective on  “Weighing the blame for illness: biology versus personal responsibility” by Dena T. Smith.

One of the axioms in neoclassical economics is that individuals are utility maximising agents who know their own preferences and have constant tastes, unlimited cognitive ability and access to all the relevant information.  These utility maximising assumptions are obviously incorrect.  However neoclassical economics uses these assumptions to derive the ‘Fundamental Theorems of Welfare’.  Simply, individuals without government interference make the optimal decisions for themselves and via the invisible hand for the whole economy.  It is optimal in the sense that you cannot make somebody better off without making somebody else worse off.

Among other issues, behavioural economics addresses self-control problems, which range from the fairly minor, such as watching too much TV, to significant social problems, such as obesity, smoking, drinking, drug-taking, gambling, speeding, and using too much credit and the inability to save.  These self-control problems are sufficient to prove the ‘Fundamental Theorems of Welfare’ is invalid without the need to address all the other anomalies of the utility maximising assumptions.

Some of the controls that governments introduce to ameliorate for self control problems infringe on the freedom of choice but they are uncontroversial for example breath testing for drink drivers, safety belts and the sale and advertising of alcohol and tobacco.  Legislation to deal with these self control problems can be viewed from addressing the supply side or demand side.  Examples of legislation affecting the supply side are reducing the trading hours of alcohol retailers or restricting the number of alcohol suppliers.  Legislation that affects the demand side includes: education, promoting alcoholics anonymous and constraints on advertising.  Obviously the alcohol industry fights any restrictions on advertising.

The ultimate supply side constraint on alcohol was the prohibition in the USA, which had the effect of spawning organised crime and police corruption.  The “war on drug” is another supply side effort that has unsurprisingly spawned more organised crime and police corruption.  An additional result of the “war on drugs” is the high price of drugs,  which requires drug users to steal and recruit more users to sell drugs to fund their own habit.  The latter produces pyramid marketing. The alternative approach is to legislate on the demand side by decriminalising the drugs and treating drug addiction as a disease for example in Switzerland, Portugal and Holland.

An alternative to legislation is taking legal action against the offending company.  If you get fat from eating at McDonald’s or get lung cancer from smoking, sue them.  While this litigious approach is lucrative for the legal system, it is more akin to an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff with the complainants allowed to buy expensive lotto tickets.  Surely it is better to prevent the population becoming obese or contracting lung cancer.

While not claiming that all self-control problems can be treated identically, there are some commonalities.  The demand side legislation on restricting advertising, providing education and treatment appears more appropriate for self-control problems than criminalising the problems, which ensues more problems.  The demand side approach acknowledges the findings of behavioural economics that people are fallible and slants the environment to help people make a better choice. The supply side approach tries to remove freedom of choice.  From a neoclassical perspective, people are utility maximising agents, so ought not to make bad choices.  If they fail to maximise utility, they are just bad or faulty people and should be punished.

By Dena T. Smith

Part of MSNBC’s lineup includes an hour-long daytime show hosted by the physician, Dr. Nancy. In a segment of her show on Monday, August 31^st, she hosted a panel to address the “war on fat people.” Panel members discussed topics such as the etiology of obesity and how the obese are treated in the US. Articles of a similar nature have appeared elsewhere, including the one below, which was featured in a recent edition of Newsweek. Overweight Americans have long been a target of criticism and mockery and even as other behaviors, addictions and illnesses have been at least partly de-stigmatized, obesity seems to be left in the cold. In other words, the discussion surrounding obesity has a similar tone to debates over other conditions and/or illnesses that are under scrutiny both in American society and globally. The tension is about the attribution of blame and the pendulum swings back and forth between personal responsibility and genetic predisposition. Who or what do we blame for obesity, depression, diabetes, addiction, etc.? How do we assign responsibility for the existence of illnesses when there is evidence that biology and lifestyle, environment, culture and elements of the social structure of a society impact said condition? Of late, most mental illness (both “milder” afflictions such as depression and anxiety as well as more severely impairing conditions like schizophrenia), and physical illness are attributed to problems in biology or chemical imbalances.  However, when it comes to obesity, Americans are quite reluctant to accept the biological blame game and this is highly consequential for the way in which overweight individuals are seen and understand themselves and their experiences.

Even more potentially problematic than the lack of attribution of cause to biology is the blaming of individual disposition. This goes beyond an unwillingness to see the underlying biological influences on obesity, which is rather paradoxical in a society that biologicizes most things. The Newsweek article mentioned above (and linked below) claims, “Fatness has always been seen as a slight on the American character. Ours is a nation that values hard work and discipline, and it’s hard for us to accept that weight could be not just a struggle of will, even when the bulk of the research—and often our own personal experience—shows that the factors leading to weight gain are much more than just simple gluttony.” Even in contemporary society, there seems to be deep-rooted resistance to the idea that anything other than failure of personal character and lack of self control causes obesity.  As I mentioned above, this is quite a contrast to how readily doctors and Americans in general tend to biologicize psychological conditions like Post-traumatic stress disorder (which is at least partly caused by trauma – something rooted in the environment) and  how readily we take the blame off of individuals for addiction (which is at least partly caused by a behavior and availability of substances).  This is perhaps most obvious with physical conditions such as heart disease and high blood pressure. We think of these as being heritable conditions, but certainly the effect of diet and exercise might decrease the chances of negative consequences.  Additionally, heart disease might be affected or even caused by personal choices or, for instance, living in a neighborhood with lack of access to healthy foods and safe conditions in which to run or play sports. In sum, many conditions that we see as biological are also clearly affected by behavior, choices and one’s surroundings. In other words, while all of these conditions may have biological components, there are other contributing factors that we often readily ignore. When it comes to obesity, we are much less willing to do this and in fact are much more likely to see everything but the biological.

Americans seem to be pre-occupied with attributing blame in general, masters at claiming to be able to identify causal pathways, but there are consequences of definitive claims about biological (or any) causality. There is an argument that biologicizing illness takes the blame off individuals. Recently, several sociologists examined the effect of biologicizing illness (specifically mental illness) and discovered that blaming genes takes some stigma away from the individual (genetic responsibility means that individual choices and lifestyles did not cause the condition). Presumably, then, this means that, when we conceptualize something as rooted in the behavior or choices of an individual, there is greater stigma. In other words, not attributing obesity to biological factors and blaming it on the poor will-power, lack of self-control or decision-making of individuals would lead to high stigma. However, there is also an argument that this makes people feel as though nothing they do or nothing about their lives affects their condition – they are destined to have the illness in question and therefore nothing about the environment matters. There seems to be a fine balance between blaming people for conditions they do not have complete (if any) control over and blaming biology, which reduces our focus on anything other than the genetic factors.

The larger questions raised by the arguments surrounding the cause of obesity are about the need to assign blame in general. Is this a part of human nature, something about American culture? Social psychologists believe that we attribute blame to what we perceive as others’ shortcomings, to their choices, to their character, to their person (of course we tend not to do this when it comes to ourselves). For a long time, illnesses such as depression were attributed to a person’s character and sufferers were considered lesser for not being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and carry on. Once causality was attributed to biology, a certain amount of that stigma disappeared. Perhaps the future of obesity is one in which, with increasing attribution to genetic causes, stigma will decrease. It certainly tells us something about the perceptions and beliefs of Americans that we seem to be resistant to the idea of biological attribution (or anything other than blaming character) for obesity but not for the majority of other common conditions.

The Fat Wars: America’s Weight Rage

“Evil Habits” and “Personal Choices”: Assigning Responsibility for Health in the 20th Century

© Deb Atkinson

I’ve collected quotes for years, but it was only last year that I discovered a problem with my system. I had the opportunity for a class to use various quotes that I felt related to the topic under discussion. Sadly I spent most of my time not enjoying the debate but chasing the citations, or attributions, for my quotes.

At the level I am working at I need to be able to point to the source of any given quote, preferably the original source. But with the explosion of the media and internet, it has become common to quote a poem or statement with only the name of the source – sometimes not even that.

Consider how many times you might have read this:

Go placidly amid the
noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

It’s the first three lines from a poem named “Desiderata.” This poem is often misattributed to anonymous with the date of authorship 1692. The author is Max Ehrmann (1872-1945) of Terre Haute, Indiana. He wrote this poem in 1927 and wished “to leave a humble gift – a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods.”

I will not quote the entire poem for I urge you good readers to seek it out in a current publication. More importantly, I urge you to consider adding attributions to the words and images – as well as seeking permission before you use them – because someday someone could quote you and not give you the credit you deserve.

For this blog, I will attempt to balance academic practice with the practical. Should I at any time misattribute or misquote someone, please inform me until I can correct my error(s).

(Desiderata For Cat Lovers: A Guide to Life & Happiness. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 2006.)