Gary Lawrence Murphy picks up the thread about Bridges and Bubbles and asks some fundamental questions about how we should evaluate the value of each link on the graph:
The bridge itself may be an accident of happenstance and bandwidth, but to grow ourselves, we’re enticed (or compelled) to test each path for inter-networked recommender bridges out from our own local space [...] Seeking Matt’s glittering cave moments, we cross over those bridges we find, and some of us become (by accident or design) new bridges for others. What’s important, the effect we want, arises not from the number of bridge paths, but by their quality, and it’s a totally subjective quality, and therefore unpredictable. Far from the networking is everything approach of Thomas Power, [...] perhaps a more efficient strategy may be a second-order goal to cultivate relationships with connected (bridging) individuals to discover what bubbles they know but also to suss out our personal metrics of the qualities of their knowledge; as with sex, quality beats quantity
Gary goes on to link this to earlier comments he wrote about the role of trust. (and that in itself is linked to a fascinating dialogue on trust that Gary has contributed to on Knowledge Board) The conversation stretches across several platforms and the interchange relevant here is between Gary and Ton Zijlstra
To summarise, Gary’s key point is
that ‘trust’ arises from a brainstate, an emotional sensation
whereas Ton says
So if we say we trust someone, this means that we recognize a consistent pattern of behaviour, and a certain level of predictability (reputation) in the other.
Gary notes (and Ton acknowledges) that most of the participants in the Knowledge Board discussion appeared to shy away from this “animal effect” to look for “higher” reasons for trust, and goes on to suggest
The more correct response is, IMHO, that while our brain colours our perceptions, humans are so blazingly successful on this planet because we can (not that we do, just that we can) transcend our physiology (when it’s appropriate!) to reach for higher conclusions.
The thing that I notice about this discussion is the Cartesian brain-vs-physiology dualism of it. IMHO looking through a systemic neuro-semantic frame will allow us to combine both insights, perhaps leading to more clarity…
Like all systems with feedback loops it’s easy to get caught into chicken-and-egg thinking if you ask which comes first - the somatic response or the meta-state thought structure about the value of a consistent pattern of perceived behaviour. It’s a truism in neuro-semantics that meta-states collapse very quickly into a neuro-physiological state. Unpicking this to explore (and maybe change) the higher level states is an important step to understand what is happening… Ton appears to have done that unpicking, and for him the feeling of trust is associated with the cognitive state of recognising consistent behaviour. Ton doesn’t mention if he actually makes his trust-based decisions on a gut feeling or whether he consciously explores the history of consistent behaviour. My guess in the absence of data is the former (but open to correction!)…
Some questions come to mind:
- Do other people share Ton’s criteria for trust?
- What other criteria might apply?
- What evidence can we glean from online connections that might allow those criteria to be applied?
- Could we create new forms of information that would help that discrimination?
- How do we Mind-to-Muscle those mental states to give an emotional signal for “online trust” that will work as a shorthand?
Lots more to do, and I’m sure others out there are further down the path. In the meantime perhaps we are, as Gary says, “back to clicking on pure blind faith”!
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January 9th, 2003 at 7:17 pm
Hi Julian,
Thanks for giving this discussion (the first topic I blogged on!) a new jolt with your contribution. You’ve guessed rightly that I too make trust based decisions on gut feeling most of the time. The only time I always consciously look for patterns of consistent behaviour is when I have a feeling that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. But there’s more to it than that for me.
As you suggest, I’m getting more and more convinced that Gary’s position and mine are not at all mutually exclusive. It’s more like the same thing but on different levels in ourselves.
This being said, I have to add two remarks that will probably clarify my personal take on this some more.
First off, my exploratory writing on trust started out from the question how my behaviour, and the structure of the organisation I work in, might influence the trust involved in our relations with others (clients, organisations etc.), and how to consciously address those effects. Hence my accent on pro-active and conscious actions.
Second, from early childhood on I have been very empathic. I, though I did not realise it then, could sense other peoples emotions very well, although I could not understand those emotions because of my age. When talking about my interpretations of what I sensed, people told me not to repeat what others had ’said’ to me , or what I ‘overheard’ and which I didn’t understand. Apparently there was something ‘wrong’ with my senses, or at least in using them. That’s when I started putting a lot of thought into rationalizing things. As an adult I had a hard time bringing these two things together again, learning to trust my own emotions and senses again, and at the same time keeping the considerable power of rationality at my disposal as well. Or in Gary’s words I’ve been trying how to learn this:
“The more correct response is, IMHO, that while our brain colours our perceptions, humans are so blazingly successful on this planet because we can (not that we do, just that we can) transcend our physiology (when it’s appropriate!) to reach for higher conclusions”
What is also at stake here (and then I’ll stop writing for now) is what made me side step Gary at first: the fear of accepting that something so powerfull and purposefull as rational thinking, could be based on, originated from, or even be tied back to back with animalistic hunches, intuitions and gut feelings.
I am currently reading Daniel C. Dennet’s ‘Darwins Dangerous Idea’that makes an enormously strong case to do away with that fear that this origin should in some way taint the wonder of conscious thought, and makes it possible to the ratio in me to still enjoy that wonder while also embracing the above.
Kind regards,
Ton
On your question how to reflect emotions and trust etc in text on the net; apparently my solution is writing long texts trying to convey all the relevant points I wish to relate to you.
January 9th, 2003 at 9:41 pm
Ton
Thanks for your thoughtful comment - I suspect there is a sound basis behind your self-assigned tendency to write “long texts “conveying all the points” - in this medium we only have the written words - no body language, no history of dealing with the person. (as an aside, that is why I think that making public the books you read is a useful addition to building the connections - it is a very good shorthand for the intellectual context of a person’s ideas…)
I think also in describing your own attributes you have hit upon the key tool for assessing trustworthiness - empathy - that ability to get inside the other person’s skin is, in my experience, a huge contribution to the gut-feeling judgement about their motivations and trustworthiness.
Empathy as a skill is often in-born, but it can also be taught. I think a lot of the trust issues within and between organisations can be hugely improved simply by developing skills of empathy and self-awareness (shades of Cluetrain’s “all markets are conversations” here!)
Beyond that, if we are to teach the skills of trustworthiness (and its counterpart, sound judgement) the challenge for me is to deconstruct *how* people make judgements (the frames of mind such as valuing consistency) in order to build a model that can be explkained, taught etc…
I find the neuro-semantics model very useful for approaching these questions for a couple of reasons - firstly because of the way it extends NLP to deal with abstract states such as “valuing consistent behaviour” and secondly because it explicity recognises that our state at any time is an emergent property of all sorts of dynamic processes.
This last point seems to have some exciting links to the Dynamic Core theory of how consciouness arises from grey matter (”A Universe of Consiousness” Edelman & Tononi 0-465-01377-5 ) - but as I haven’t finished reading that reference yet I’m not ready to expound those thoughts yet!!
best regards
Julian
January 10th, 2003 at 5:09 am
whew … and here I thought I was just rambling on a grumpy old rant!
What is empathy? When I worked on early expert systems in the 1980’s, what I found most curious was how engineers (and the Bank economists too!) most often did not really know how they arrived at their answers. They had lots of smoke and mirrors, but their base data, their core assumptions, were “empathic”. It’s a wonderful word, it drums up all sorts of images of ESP, but what is it really?
Connectionist machines are empathic. When I have a rule-based expert system, it spits out if this then that chains to explain why it cannot get the right answer, but the neural network that spots and parses the ID number on the side of moving railway cars just gives me a number and says “take it or leave it”, it cannot retrace its procedural steps because there weren’t any. Data appeared on all inputs, and an answer formed in the outputs.
I don’t discount that there may be other planes of knowing, other channels of data flow, but I don’t see as there needs to be. When we say we are learning to be more empathic, we’re just learning Suzuki Roshi’s advice of “Attention, attention, attention!” and making more effort to provide the connectionist machine (the organ of the brain) with more data. Like other connectionist machines, it arrives at a “confidence” metric provided there are no pattern tricks going on, so Ton can become confident when “valuing consistent behaviour” but if you’ve ever been to a ventriloquist act or a stage magician, you’ve seen that valuation become hilariously misled!
(interesting aside to note that ventriloquism was first used to deceive people into believing in disembodied voices, and the Oracle of Delphi used this trick to actually impress her will upon hapless subscribers!)
I don’t want to imply a duality, because that’s exactly the problem: We’d like to step outside our wetware and say we can be rational in spite of ourselves, but we can only be rational with the wetware, and it all gets tainted; we can inch along, but with a handicap that we can never be sure if the voice is real or if it’s a clever pretty girl with her legs apart (the Oracle that is
January 10th, 2003 at 5:15 am
Watch what you say
Julian’s been piecing together bits of a long trail of cross-blog conversations on thoughts on Synesthesia : Blogging network and the neuro-semantics of trust. The threads seem to be congealing to some
January 11th, 2003 at 6:51 pm
Hi Julian,
Forgot to mention it the first time, but you’ve accidently misspelled my last name. It’s Zijlstra in stead of Zjilstra. In Dutch the ij is used sort of like a y (which we call a Greek ij).
A ‘zijl’ is Frisian for ‘waterlock, or place by the water.(Friesland is a northern province with its own language, where my paternal grandparents hail from) So my name sort of means “He who lives by the water”, which could be anybody in Friesland, due to the enormous amount of surface water they have. The name’s not so common as “De Vries” though which merely means ‘the Frisian’. Original huh?
January 15th, 2003 at 1:27 pm
Fixed. apologies!
March 10th, 2003 at 4:59 am
Hmmm … not sure what you all are talking about, but this page came up in a web search for “Neuro-Semantics”. How does one navigate around this blog? Is it possible for me to set one up like it on my own web page?
Ed Borasky
znmeb@borasky-research.net
http://www.borasky-research.net
May 5th, 2003 at 11:23 am
Trust, Emotion, Ratio
Continuing the explorations of what trust is, Julian Elvé, the author of Synesthesia, picks up on my discussion with Gary Lawrence Murphy and adds his own thoughts and questions on how to bring Gary’s view and mine under one hat….