From: Steve Witham (sw@tiac.net)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2003 - 21:35:27 MDT
Hal Finney wrote:
>However my guess is that it will be able to proceed now that
>some of the more provocative imagery and examples have been removed from
>the web site.
Oh, it was even worse than it is now? I suggested to Robin an FAQ
answering some of the concerns, er, emotional, people might have.
>[...]My take on it is that there is
>a certain strategy, or perspective, or philosophy, which gives great
>value to emotional response.
>[...]it is in competition
>with an alternative philosophy which reduces the importance of emotional
>reactions relative to abstract intellectual reaasoning.
Besides analyzing these as meme sets, we can ask what's right & wrong about
each. What are the values of emotional vs. non-emotional thinking?
In that connection I recommend Antonio Damasio's _Descartes' Error_
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380726475
Mainly a survey of his own research & theories
about the role that emotion plays in
good reasoning. One interesting line of research is with people
with brain damage in certain areas related to emotional processing.
They can solve puzzles or do tasks of a problem-solving sort,
but fail to manage the big picture of their lives (always getting
fired, etc.). They get rude and thoughtless, and have trouble making
some kinds of judgements that seem fairly straightforward to, er,
normals.
(I figure the case for dispassionate thinking is one we're all
more familiar with. The ability to make sure brain is engaged
before putting press release in gear.)
>I'm not sure what lesson we can draw from this, other than to recognize
>the existence of these two points of view, and to try to respect the
>other one even if you don't agree with it.
In retrospect, PR is probably more natural to emotional people.
--Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 28 2003 - 21:39:23 MDT