"Who's the weirdo?"       "The object of group truth is group-confirmation and perpetuation."      -- Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 1928

As usual, Laura Riding is unpleasantly correct. Science says so! A top priority for any social group is to protect the integrity of the group by erasing disputes within the group and exaggerating disputes with those outside the group. We need to synchronize our beliefs; their truth is a secondary (if that) consideration. One might even speculate that the very concept of verifiable "truth" develops -- not invariably -- from the social pressure to eliminate disagreement.

One well-documented result is that group discussions polarize attitudes, leading not so much to the lowest common denominator as to the most extreme tenable discriminator. Stereotyping of other groups, for example, follows that pattern: after a good hearty talk about Those People, mild prejudices become more vicious, and, having been publicly stated, more clung to.

Sadly (for those of us who perceive innate value in "truth"), just providing evidence to the contrary to everyone in the group isn't enough to interfere with this high-contrast-filter transformation. People -- not being essentially rational -- don't waste attention on evidence unless there's a reason to. If everyone in the group shares familiarity with the same counter-stereotypic information, they don't feel compelled to bring that information up. It's old news, as the saying goes.

But in "The Communication of Social Stereotypes" (Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 3), Markus Brauer, Charles M. Judd, & Vincent Jacquelin found a loophole:

If only one member of the group knows the counter-stereotypic information, the information is grounds for disagreement. Thus it becomes interesting, attention is drawn to it, and polarization doesn't occur. Heterogeneity within the group increases the visibility of evidence, and thus the validity of group opinions.

Some comments:

1. Anyone who's lived and worked both in widely diverse groups and in severely monocultural groups (and who perceives innate value in "truth") knows how much more satisfying the former are. Obviously, this is partly because there are fewer polarization points for untruths to latch onto. But secondarily, experience and knowledge may become more accessible to the group if they vary.

2. Which in turn reminds me of the ways in which teaching can help the teacher learn.

3. More depressively, I might guess that there are some cultural dependencies at work here, and that, internationally, not all groups would be equally invested in debate as a way to secure group boundaries.

4. More obsessively, I scribble a barely legible cross-reference into my neuraesthetics notes: "attention drawn to particulars: evolutionary counterbalance to generalization."

"Who's the weirdo?", cont.

You know what makes me happy?

... well, yeah, "trying the patience of the reader" works, but you know what else?

It's when results reported in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology match results reported in cognitive science texts from MIT Press. As for example, on the good ship Cognition in the Wild, skippered by Edwin Hutchins, who I trust, among other reasons, 'cause he says "the real value of connectionism for understanding the social distribution of cognition will come from a more complicated analogy in which individuals are modeled by whole networks or assemblies of networks, and in which systems of socially distributed cognition are modeled by communities of networks." Boo-yah!

Cap'n Hutchins set up a constraint-satisfaction connectionist network to simulate hypothesis resolution between communicating gatherers of evidence for or against conflicting hypotheses.

Consider a simulation experiment in which all the networks have the same underlying constraint structure, and all have the same access to environmental evidence, but each has a slightly different initial pattern of activation than any of the others. Furthermore, all the networks communicate with one another, all the units in each network are connected to all the units in the other networks, and the communication is continuous. This can be regarded as a model of mass mental telepathy. With a nonzero persuasiveness, each individual network moves toward [the same] interpretation more quickly. ... Once there, they respond only a little to additional evidence from the environment. Once in consensus, they stay in consensus even if they have had to change their minds in order to reach consensus.... a group mind would be more prone to confirmation bias than any individual mind.

... diversity of interpretations is fairly easy to produce as long as the communication among the members of the community is not too rich. If they are allowed to go their own ways for a while, attending to both the available evidence and their predispositions, and then to communicate with one another, they will first sample the information in the environment and then go (as a group) to the interpretation that is best supported.

Given that, he went on to set up primitive models of such painfully familiar conflict-resolution approaches as monarchy, Quaker-style consensus, and majority-rule voting. No surprises as to the plusses (shortened time to resolution) or minuses (d'oh!) of monarchy. Or of consensus:

if some individuals arrive at very well-formed interpretations that are in conflict with one another before communication begins, there may be no resolution at all.

With majority rule, he points out:

voting does not always produce the same results that would be achieved by further communication. That this is so can easily be deduced from the fact that the result of a voting procedure for a given state of the community is always the same, whereas a given state of the community may lead in the future to many different outcomes at the group level (depending on... the bandwidth of subsequent communication).

Probably because of wanting to keep the models simple, he doesn't mention another serious problem with working democracies, or at least the one I'm in right now: Block-voting by a prematurely and persistently frozen-state monoculture of theocratic fundamentalists. Once a plurality of voters has arrived at very well-formed interpretations, they may ignore any evidence that contradicts their hypotheses and still be able to win control of the government.

Hutchins speculates that "in some environments, chronic indecision may be much less adaptive than some level of erroneous commitment." And I have a further obsessive (with the combined force of two obsessions) speculative comment of my own:

5.

The computer simulations I've seen of language and other human memory-experience-extenders assume constant access and transmission. That might be true of oral culture. The only thing transmitted through time is what's always important at each time. (Which may in turn be how the notion of sacred narratives and formulae developed: as a way of keeping seemingly arbitrary language in place, working against the ravages of convenience.) But artifacts -- such as writing -- can outlast their time and their popularity, and survive to transmit new information -- that is, to transmit old information to new recipients. Anything that develops outside of our own cultural circumstances provides, by definition, that healthy "diversity of interpretation" based on "broken communication" between entities that have "gone their own ways for a while." My quixotic rage against copyright extension has nothing to do with those profitable works that get all the publicity --those which are popular and reprinted. I don't care whether Disney gets the money for Disney properties or not, so long as the Disney properties are available. No, the utterly blankly death-reeking evil aspect of copyright extension and extension and extension is our forced regression to a secular oral culture, crushing into dust (if paper) or vinegar-reeking glue (if film) those artifacts that aren't currently -- at every moment -- obviously overwhelmingly profitable.

Time Flies Like a Banana

After the Tudors, the canonical history of English song splits into unsingable-poetry-for-reading and abstract-music-for-listening, a process pretty much complete by the time you get to Dryden and Handel.

Now, you could say (as Pound did) that this is disgraceful decadence, same as when music separates from dance. But why be doomy about it? People do get bored with constraints, after all. Unencumbered, music gained opportunities, and although they may have been squandered, aesthetics is with Abraham: Peradventure there be ten righteous within the genre, then spare all the place for their sakes.

Even when Renaissance lyric was most neglected, evidence of its existence wasn't completely erased. That's the magic of artifact: the old hat survives to be rediscovered as healing-touch relic. (And, paddling my hobbyhorse, that's also the tragedy of copyright extension, which buries work alive and then posts a guard against desecration by exhumers.) Meanwhile, among the unwashed folk, and then among the unwashed consumers, integrated song and integrated dance rattled merrily along outside the approved cultural marketplace, eventually to be picked up by ambitious self-marketers.

Most of us would admit that poetry's landholdings have only shrunk since Pound's youth. Verse is no longer written for newspapers; newspapers don't even quote it except for sake of scandal. We don't experience quotidian poetry; its role has been taken over by other arts.

And this isn't something to regret, unless you're too snobbish to credit any virtù outside your own. It's perfectly fine that Anton Webern wasn't Robert Johnson: compromise wouldn't have been improvement. Cultural history doesn't reflect a decline but a series of bifurcations and tardy acknowledgments.

So when I call poetry dead, or call our period Hellenistic, I don't mean it insultingly. The high arts aren't "high" as in class, or "high" as in IQ, but "high" as in "that venison is beginning to get pretty high." There's the ripeness of strawberries and there's the ripeness of cheese.

Twentieth-century-and-later Anglo poetry is interesting because it's a dead art. The dead have one great advantage: They don't have to make a living.

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Are weblogs, in contrast, a living form?

Not the way I do them.