Cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error

Osaka cab view

In Himeji, on total down time, riding a simple bicycle and doing nothing. I think I may've outgrown the idea that a vacation should be judged by how many intoxicants are consumed and how much sex is had. All of this just ahead of my [next] mid-life crisis, which should see a tremendous regression on all fronts.

The contrast with last summer could hardly be greater, when I was working all the time and feeling wasted. I have work with me here, but it's an hour or so in the morning, an hour or so at night.

Previous research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...

These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.

Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia

Related posts:
Impelled by convention

To hell with authenticity

The creature that wins against its environment

Walking my legs to stumps in Kyoto and Osaka. The picture is of the woodwork in part of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which I'll write up later.

I've had the quote below in my notebook and ready to post for some time, and at first I thought it was unrelated to the temple, but going over it there's a connection with some of the ideas that play out again and again in Mishima, with the hero finding victory in self-destruction.

....the ideas which dominate our civilization at the
present time date in their most virulent form from the
Industrial Revolution. They may be summarized as:

(a) It's us against the environment.

(b) It's us against other men.

(c) It's the 'individual' (or the individual company, or
the individual nation) that matters.

(d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

(e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."

(f) Economic determinism is common sense.

(g) Technology will do it for us.

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievements of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

Gregory Bateson, cut/pasted from here, and also in Steps to an Ecology of Mind [my bold].

Out of the blue

Knowing when to stop

freelancers operate unconstrained by dress codes and other workplace conventions

Have burned through various systems & schedules in the last seven months of freelancing. The current iteration is to get up at 8am and work through until a bike ride / lunch, then work again until somewhere between 4pm and 6pm, when it's clear that nothing more can done at a decent speed or in good spirit, and then I just quit and forget about work until the next morning.

What's striking to me is how, after all the strange schedules I've tried, the most conventional one, essentially 9-to-5, is the one that feels and works best

Apart from a few months in 1992, I've never had a 9-to-5 job. The novelty has yet to wear off.

Away from home

Will be in Japan for two weeks from July 6th - Osaka, Kyoto and Himeji.

Tales of extraordinary madness

our tiny garden is a jungle

The St. Petersburg Times ran a three-part series on Scientology last week, with the focus mainly on bullying at the management levels. It was good for what it was, but it didn't go into the true madness of the thing.

I.
L Ron Hubbard's Admissions is like a madman's little book of wisdom. Keep it by your bedside and meditate on a section each night before sleeping. It's a list of platitudes, memos to self and self-aggrandizing asides in the second person. Examples:

You can sing beautifully. Your voice can imitate any singer. Your tones are round and true. You have no superstitions about singing at any time. Your oratory is magnificent. Your voice tones perfect, your choice of words marvelous, your logic unassailable.

Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves. Elemental spirits are your slaves. You are power among powers, light in the darkness, beauty in all.

Your eyes are getting progressively better. They became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy. You have no reason to keep them bad and now they can get well and they will become eventually starting now as keen as an eagle's with clear whites and green pupils. Sunlight does not affect them. Lack of sleep does not affect them.

Your foot was an alibi. The injury is no longer needed. It is well. You have perfect and lovely feet.

You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness. The act does not reduce your vitality or brain power at all. You can come several times and still write. Intercourse does not hurt your chest or make you sore. Your arms are strong and do not ache in the act. Your own pleasure is not dependent on the woman's. You are interested only in your own sexual pleasure. If she gets any that is all right but not vital. Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. Their bodies thrill you. If they repel you, it merely means they themselves are too frigid or prudish to be bothered with. They are unimportant in bed except as they thrill you. Your sexual power is magnificent and they know it. If they are afraid of it, that is their loss. You are not affected by it.

Part one here, but all the above are from part two.

II.
The clip below shows David Miscavige, the current 'head' of Scientology, announcing the death of L Ron Hubbard. It's great to see his face as spins the news of Hubbard having left his body to continue his research.



III.
This is my favorite. I sat and watched whole set [7 x 30 min] straight through. It's Steven Fishman in a seven-part video deposition that goes into his beliefs about himself and Scientology. The horror only grows over the running time, right up to the last scene - the tour of the library.

Steven Fishman is a former Scientologist whose inclusion of Scientology's secret Operating Thetan levels in a court filing led to the first public confirmation by the Church of Scientology of its doctrines regarding Xenu and the Wall of Fire. Wikipedia

Great headline

Michael Jackson set to be embalmed at the O2 Centre after missing the deadline for cryogenic freezing

Preliminary findings

Background
September last year I wrote:

I think if I worked in an office I'd be far more lecherous and alarming than I am, far more prone to obsession and liable to lose my bearings if an attractive young woman struck up a friendly conversation.

Why I am so chaste

Hypothesis
Working in an office was not the key point, but rather working in an environment that wasn't filled with attractive women and girls who were there to interact with me, as happens [happened] in conversation classes. So, there was a testable hypothesis contained in that earlier post, as follows:
My lechery and alarming behavior are inversely proportional to the amount of friendly conversation I engage in with attractive young women.

Preliminary findings
Nine months later, and I no longer teach in any significant capacity, and so do not spend all day, every day in conversation with attractive young women.

The evidence of the last 6.5 months suggests strong support for the hypothesis.

Limitations, and suggestions for future work
It should be noted that this preliminary investigation does not consider any possible variables, such as the consumption of alcohol and the fact that I'm married. However, whether these factors are significant, and if so, whether they are moderating or mediating variables, is something that future work will address.

Related post: Made of anecdotes and punchlines

Repetition and meditating on simple numbers

Photo of a coneflower by Tim Stone [website down] and a short article on the math it expresses

I've taken up swimming in an attempt to halt the cascading failures in my body after 6.5 months of partying too much.

Three weeks of changes - a lot less drinking and back on low carb / primal exercise - and I can already feel things starting to turn around and churn beneath the surface. Stochastic systems and emergence mean a certain amount of surrender is required when it comes to doing the right things for your body. If you can quiet yourself for long enough and listen to what your body is saying, then the answer will often be clear. And, like Haruki Murakami writes in another post: Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

There are a lot of pools in this part of town, and the one two streets over is probably the worst, so after 7pm there's usually only one or two people there. I do 60 x 25m, and to not lose count / keep my head relatively quiet I focus only on the numbers, manipulating them in various ways. This is kind of dull for one and two, but picks up with three and beyond.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. My conscious thoughts are very simple, and I'm barely numerate, so these are basic exercises, but they please me and they get the job done. I don't lose count or think too much, and the swimming is done in a trance.

Anyway, this link leads to a list maintained by Erich Friedman that explains what's special about a lot of numbers, which is similar to this list of the properties of the first 5,000 integers. Lots of things to thing about when you're counting to 100.

Mugwump jism

Fifty years since Naked Lunch was published, and whatever strange trip I've been on since my mid-teens has been in part inspired by that first rush of books, which helped me run counter to everything that had been intended or could expected for my future. So, a moment of gratitude to walking corpses everywhere, with a favorite interpretation of the work, below.

Bug Powder Dust, by Bomb The Bass featuring Justin Warfield [1994]

Fat man in a cul-de-sac

They don't have to tell me about this human condition: I'm in it.

B.S. Johnson, caption from Street Children

B.S. Johnson's Fat Man on a Beach has turned up, and all five parts are posted below.

If you don't know him, then it's of limited interest [almost certainly none], probably like the rest of this post.

He was a modernist writer who got caught in too many traps, mostly set by himself. I think he had very limited talents that he stretched too far with style, and when the talent broke and the style ran out there was little left over to live on. He killed himself in a bathtub at the age of 40, in 1973. With better choices perhaps he could have been Georges Perec, who died of natural causes [lung cancer] at the age of 45, in 1982, but he wasn't.

Although he did have some good titles, and to my way of thinking [which I accept is a little cracked] Instructions for the Use of Women is at least as good as Laferrière's How to Make Love to a Negro, although the latter is the better work, and neither are that outstanding.

I read Jonathan Coe's good biography of Johnson earlier this year, which a) explained why I'd been able to read all of this hard to find author's works while at university [Warwick had an English professor who was a supporter, and the library was well-stocked], and b) made it plain that the best I could have hoped for if I'd pursued a literary career would've been to become a failed B.S. Johnson. Moreover, and more importantly, that a failure in this case would still have been better than the real thing, as long as it was done fast (as it more or less was).

Some people have easy lives, but most face a long series of struggles. I write that, thinking about B.S. Johnson, with no idea if it's true, having no access to the lived experience of others. My life is very easy, with the few problems I ever face are nearly all of my own devising. But this might signify an emotional poverty or lack of daring on my own part, an unwillingness to engage more completely. I don't think it matters - I'd rather be a pig in shit than a sad philosopher.

part one

part two

[The start of the anecdote Coe mentions about the motorcycle accident / cheese starts near the end of part two...]

part three

[...and finishes at the start of part three]

part four

part five

Putting your leg out of the water

After no posts in the first quarter of the year Ken Mogi's English blog is picking up speed again. He's a Japanese mind-brain researcher, and a particular favorite of Yuki's. He writes very simply and clearly in English, like Yechezkel Zilber, and the effect is somewhat similar.

When I was an undergraduate, I made friends with Ken Shiotani, now a "philosopher-at-large", (meaning, in this particular usage, that he does not belong to any university, institution, etc.; he is not paid for his "philosophizing"). I and Shiotani would discuss these difficult things walking along the Sumida river, drinking beer, persevering a cold night air in a park. At that time, we were quite young and ignorant, but our aspirations were astronomical.

One day, Shiotani drew up a metaphor. He would like to be the "protoamphibian" who "put his leg out of water" for the first time in history. There are heaps of things that the human mind has not had access to yet, and he would like to be the first one to do it. After many years of dormancy, I think he is still aspiring to that.

Another Shiotani quote stayed with me. I think it was one of these days when I was wont to hang out with him in Tokyo bars and Izakayas. After speaking wishfully [sic - wistfully?] of his friends who were "climbing the ladders" smoothly and becoming authors and associate professors, Shiotani sighed and said thus.

"I don't want to be a star myself. I would rather like to be the dark void in which all these constellations shine".

He is that kind of person. Practical things are too small for him.

Managing insanity in a proper way

Things that didn't happen

My tendency is to oversimplify, which seems to work out fine, as even the most complex systems move at different levels through states of complexity and simplicity, apparent chaos and underlying / overarching order. Also, I live a very limited life [no authority, no kids] in which the consequences of making mistakes rarely spill out of this room.

However, that doesn't mean my life is not, from some perspectives, one long string of mistakes, simplicity falling into chaos, even though I can never see it like that.

I rarely think about the past, but sometimes I list episodes when things almost took a turn for the definite worse, inre. unplanned parenthood, imprisonment, serious injury or death. If I was the praying type, and I'm not, I would've begged some god to get me out of those situations with the promise to lead a better life from then on. Perhaps the fact no prayers were made doesn't matter, and I still ought to have done things differently and better, and perhaps I did.

Related post: The utility of slack

Made of anecdotes and punchlines

There are some things some people shouldn't read, and I shouldn't be allowed near any version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I tend to go through the check-lists feeling like someone has just read my soul. The other week I decided that I had avoidant personality disorder, and so brooded on that for a while, then decided to go out and test the hypothesis. I came home at sunrise convinced that I'm a narcissistic psychopath instead /as well.

Earlier in the evening, my body chemistry still to be trusted and the alcohol only slightly sedating inhibitions, when the loggorhea hadn't yet kicked in and I was still capable of listening, I introduced myself to a guy and he said "Oh, I know about you", which was a surprise, as apart from the last six months I've spent the last three years being fairly reclusive, too busy working early in the morning / late at night to haunt bars and hang out in conversation.

He used to share an apartment with one of my exes, and then another place with a girl I used to know in another town. I said "oh, you must know a lot of bad things about me."

I didn't feel this was being self-deprecating at all. I think I exist very little in the minds of others, which is A-OK and how things should be around here, but am aware that most likely when I do appear in conversations in the third person that the proportion of anecdotes + punchlines to fond memories is fairly high. This is something which I've been trying to address, although my attempts seem to end in anecdotes and punchlines.

But the guy said, "no, not at all, only good things," and that was cool. Then he asked me if it was true that I'd once tied myself to a bed when taking an exotic hallucinogen for the first time, alone.

Later in the evening, almost sunrise, I possessed by the spirit of Randy Pan the Goat-boy. I have no idea how this went across, but badly, I suspect.

Bill Hicks doing the Goat-boy routine

Emergent AI

A-Pod by Zenta, unrelated to the story below

...the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially random...

At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most charge left in their batteries were chosen as "successful", and their neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the robots...

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed - helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone...

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

If intelligence is an emergent property of enough sensors and feedback, then AI could be sudden and undesigned - consciousness as a phase transition from the disorder of too many individual processes to a simplistic whole.

An idea to trip on. AI emerges from all our networks - then why would it need to make contact? It knows all that we can express in language, numbers and other symbolic systems, and it can do things with this data. That kind of manipulation is trivial. It is, after all, a massive distributed system that lives to process data.

Moreover, if need be it can influence us in far more subtle and effective ways than "I command...". It massages the figures, spreads the memes, pushes things in the right direction. This doesn't need to be a two-way street. It would not be a meeting of equals. All it needs is for us to keep building sensors and computers and connecting them.

Ways of seeing

almost taiwan

One of the most fascinating aspects of the birth of a new science is the new language it creates, allowing us to casually converse about ideas and issues that we were struggling to describe before.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked p222

Aside from the obvious sensory disarrangement, the main component of the psychedelic experience for me is a shift in perspective, a way seeing familiar things in a different light. One other way to do this is to read / listen as widely as possible. For example, you can go into a restaurant and trip out on:

• The taste, smell and texture of the food.
• The sense memories the meal engenders.
  
• The provenance of each ingredient.
• The chemical processes involved in their preparation.
• The physical processes of eating and digestion.
• The nutritional content of the food.
  
• The social dynamics between the people in the restaurant.
• The financial side of the business.
• How the place fits into the neighborhood.
• ...and so on.
  

All these things are floating around, different ways to talk about the same thing, and the richness of the experience seems to be in sometimes surrendering to one view and letting it take you as far as it can, and other times being easily distracted, taking a more comprehensive look at aspects that you mostly ignore.

Related posts:
Why I go out drinking more often than before
Mundane in one group
A continuous network of critical states

coop - mickey finn

Same again (hacking the beast-machine)

bialetti - one more

There's no way for me to directly control a lot of what I do. Essentially, I've given up responsibility for my actions as and when they occur, and instead as much as possible focus on the set and setting ahead of time. Fortunately [but mostly not] I'm good at getting habits, so I can set up workarounds and little hacks and see what they produce.

I used to drink way too much coffee, and I couldn't stop myself. I started grinding my own beans and using a little stove top moka pot so that the time / effort required for each cup would act as a restraint. It works very well - down to three cups a day - exploiting my own laziness / intertia to get things done.

Related post: Monkey orgasm button

The pratfall effect

french paper

The pratfall effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby the attractiveness of a person perceived as competent increases if the person commits a blunder. Conversely, the attractiveness of a person perceived as incompetent decreases if the person commits a blunder.

Wikipedia

....an experiment by Kay Deaux demonstrates that the pratfall effect applies most strongly to males. She found that, although most males in her study preferred the highly competent man who committed a blunder, women showed a tendency to prefer the highly competent nonblunderer, regardless of whether the stimulus person was male or female. Similarly, my colleagues and I found that males with a moderate degree of self-esteem are most likely to prefer the highly competent person who commits a blunder, while males with low self-esteem (who apparently feel little competitiveness with the stimulus person) prefer the highly competent person who doesn't blunder. It should be emphasized that no sizable proportion of people-regardless of their own level of self-esteem-preferred the mediocre person.

Elliot Aronson The Social Animal [via here - link contains a longer account of the original experiment]

Used goods

60s chessboard 01 - ilikegraphics

I've got more books than I need but less than I want, although sometimes I'll go through the ones I've read and have no intention of opening again and take them to a secondhand store. What happens later is I go back to the same store and half the things that catch my eye are books that used to belong to me.

I like secondhand stores, but sometimes it's depressing to see the crap that people have bought and owned and parted with and now it's trying to being sold. But when I die / hit bottom and sell out, my own possessions will be baffling - 'he made a life out of this?' - but life, as you know, isn't in such things.

There's no explaining the cotton coasters on this desk or the picture frames - they fail to transcend their nature as coasters and frames, and cut from active use they're horrible things, like false teeth. I'm pushing 40 and the house I live in is almost empty and totally undecorated, save for white paint and some of the landlord's paintings. I don't care. My desk is alive with things that have some meaning, which means: photos of me and my wife, pens, notes, scissors, tissues, water, beer, chewing gum, an army knife, speakers, some cacti, a stopwatch and tis machine.Welcome to my world.

The next warehouse, in Waukegan, brought a unit full of — depending on how you look at it — cherished household possessions or somebody’s trash. Most of the bidders took the latter view, disdaining an offer. Tonya Boyd bought the bulging plastic bags for all of $6. “It looks like someone had some troubles,” said Ms. Boyd, an employment specialist. There were piles of clothes, brand-new women’s shoes, old chairs, a dirty fan, kitchenware.

For some units, $6 is too much. “A dollar bill, first dollar bill takes it,” Mr. Snyder implored in front of one unit. “Come on, this is everything they own!” To no avail.

This is the eternal mystery of self-storage. If the material was worth money, it was foolish to let it go to default. If it was not worth much, why spend at least $50 a month to store it?

Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage - NY Times

Pushing at an open door

Al Wiseman

Having no lead to follow, we were swept up by words, memories, manias, grudges, and solidarities. Having no goal to aim for, we wasted what little life there was in our thoughts on joining in with a pun, speaking ill of common acquaintances, avoiding unpleasant facts, riding hobbyhorses, pushing at open doors, making faces, and preening ourselves.

Rene Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p7

This must be the place

Home, is where I want to be,
but I guess I'm already there.

Talking Heads, above

It may be mild OCD or just a lack of imagination, but I rode my bicycle around the darkest, quietest streets downtown tonight for 2.5 hrs with this song playing on repeat, and I did it from feeling very good to feeling bad to feeling very good again. And then I went into a bar and washed out the fine body chemistry of caffeine, starvation and physical exertion, to achieve the robust equilibrium I now find myself in.

I'm quiet happy to see time as either an illusion or strictly linear - it's the circular thing that I find unconvincing. So years do not mean a lot to me, nor dates within them. But they serve an important administrative function, and this [mid-May] is the time of year I usually have to renew my visa. Been like that since 1998, but this year I don't need to - I have permanent residency, so no blood test [drugs, AIDS], photos and so on. This place is home.

An ideal for living

sarah franklin

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

Robert Anton Wilson

Pronoia: the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.

Related post: Shadowplay

Transmission of the agape

meso-american mushroom stones

Nothing sacred ever really dies out.

Richard Evans Schultes in a two part lecture on hallucinogenic plants here [audio not great, because it's old, but I don't know how old]

Schultes was one of the founding fathers of the discipline, along with R. Gordon Wasson and Dr. Hoffmann.

The palace of excess

I'll say at least one thing about drinking with frat boys: it does quickly disabuse you of the notion that there may be any wisdom at the end of narcotic, alcoholic or sexual excess.

Manhattan projection

horizonless projection of manhattan, by schulze & webb [click to enlarge]

No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.

Spencer Thursfield, via Jack Schulze