Interesting words and phrases that you like to use in conversation to polish your intellectualist cock.
I'll start with 'cognoscenti' - meaning an expert in some field. Twice I have used it so far and received looks not unlike that you would give a chimpanzee that recited the Lord's Prayer.
I usually don't mention the fact that I first learnt of it from GTA IV
Cognoscenti is a plural. If you were using it as a singular, they were probably giving you a look to say this person tried to crowbar a "big word" into a conversation then used it wrong.
>>5881 Ah no I used it as a plural. Having said that, given that it's Italian in origin wouldn't the singular cognoscente still be pronounced almost the same (-ey versus -ee)?
>>5879 That's outright heresy. There is no situation where ketchup should be used over either one of gravy, brown sauce, barbecue sauce, mustard or garlic sauce. It's the village bike of condiments. Cheap thrills.
there's a reason the village bike gets ridden, it's because it's a bloody good and enjoyable ride. Don't pretend you are so morally high and mighty because your just bitter no one will eat your fat ugly sauce.
>>5902 I remember learning that this was the type of thing they taught in body language classes and you could instantly tell which twats had been to these classes because they copy everything the other person does.
Someone I had a crush on used to pronounce the start of "nothing" as if it rhymed with Hoth, but I'd say it "nuth". But because we spoke so often I ended up saying it the Hoth way.
>>5903 Once I picked up a glass at the same time as some girl I was drinking with, and she looked away and said under her breath something to the effect of "Oh god you're not one of those are you". I knew what she meant but couldn't do anything about it at the risk of appearing more creepy. Story of my life :(
You could have said "not one of those what? What're you on about?"
She would then have explained and you could have laughed dismissively and said it was merely a coincidence and you have far better ways of impressing women, at which point she would have pulled you into the toilets and buried your knob in her throat and you could both have carried on with your lives.
>>5906 >and she looked away and said under her breath something to the effect of "Oh god you're not one of those are you".
Well, some things have just become such classic "conversation 101" items that they are tired out and easy to spot for those who have seen it all before.
Myself, I try to stay unconventional. I make an effort to let the person I am talking to know that I am interested in what they tell me, but I try to be harder to spot and figure out as far as these kinds of "blueprint" behavioural patterns go. And I feel insulted myself when I spot those "faking interest" behavioural patterns in other people. Long before they've realised what they just did.
Somebody once said to me, the key to getting ahead in life is to anticipate other people's anticipations. Therefore, if you anticipate that somebody you are talking to will be put off by this kind of exchangeable schematic body language, why not change things up a little.
>>5909 My interpretation is that he wasn't consciously trying to mirror her actions, just one of those weird things that happens and gets misinterpreted.
You should go read about transactional analysis and game theory in psychology. Interesting stuff, certainly pulls back the curtain a bit when you find yourself in "one of those" situations at work or wherever.
All I said was, that's what somebody once told me about how to get ahead in life. I haven't got ahead in life, still desperately hoping for it to happen... ahem...
If it helps any, I've got a degree in economics, and one of my professors was a big fan of game theory, chiefly in the context of corporate marketing, but once you've understood the concept of game theory, it's transferable to basic human psychology as well. Especially things like the Prisoner's Dilemma... which can be used for example to explain why cooperation between two people can lead to better results than quibbling and rivalry.
>>5912 And the Prisoner's Dilemma can also be used to explain why the possible consequences of screwing over someone else are always a collectively better option to an individual than the possible consequences of not.
It's why people shoot each other on sight in DayZ et al.
>>5912 My problem with game theory is that it presumes rational players making rational decisions. I don't think it really holds up in reality when humans are pretty much all fucked in the head.
Not exclusively... you can model human irrationality in game theory. Of course that means at some point to generalise again, and then you again end up with a model that doesn't mirror reality fully.
But it can be done. One way can be to just assume that irrationality means randomness of a player's actions, and then you can ask how that randomness can best be responded to by another player. Or you can just devise probabilities of different irrational actions by a player, perhaps corroborated by statistical data as to how likely certain behaviours and responses by a player will be.
Bog standard game theory 101 will not always teach this, no. But again, the basic models can be expanded to a great extent to factor in human irrationality.
>>5915 Smug unfunny webcomics deserve their own /101/ thread really.
>>5916 Yeah fair enough, I'm not arguing it isn't a useful theory in various disciplines and fields, but as you say I don't think it's able to fully reflect reality. Basically whilst I'm sure it works in a lot of ways I just don't think you can necessarily predict, explain or understand all human behaviour with it, even adjusting for "randomness" or statistically likely irrational behaviours.
Most people might well shoot on sight in DayZ but that doesn't mean that the odd person won't sneak up on you, hand cuff you, force feed you rotten tomatoes, make you take off your trousers and roll around on the ground for 10 minutes whilst squat dancing to Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint then run off into the night laughing.
Yes but in a way, that is true of all models... A model is rarely meant to be a mirror image of reality in every single minute detail... but good models capture the essence of something and then reflect on that something in a more or less generalised way that allows to draw general conclusions which can then ideally be applied to reality.
Which is why I mentioned transactional analysis too. When you factor in the adult and child ego states to social interactions, the irrationality starts to make more sense.
I should probably have put the "in psychology" part in italics in the post I brought this up in, because it is a slightly tangential field to the normal mathematical game theory you lot are all on about.
>>5918 I'd pretty much agree with all that, I think my issue is more to do with people assuming they can apply what I'd regard as quite a "narrow" theory to all human behaviour.
>>5919 To be honest I don't really know enough about transactional analysis to make any sort of argument. Out of curiosity though, do you think that you're able to make sense of human behaviour with a combination of the two theories?
A good chunk of it, yes. Obviously there is no theory that will explain away the entirety of human endeavour, but a good chunk of what we spend our lives doing between cradle and grave is covered. Humans are habitual, ritualistic creatures by nature and the "games" defined when studying behaviour are often ingrained parts of the socialisation process- We sometimes call it politeness or manners, that sort of thing. We are talking about the expected ways for people to behave in social environments, for which there are rewards and punishments if a person (player) plays by the book, or breaks the rules.
Consider if you will Gemma from HR. She always moans about her partner and how controlling and restricting he is- He won't let her go out and take up a night class, for example. She surrounds herself with acquaintances who are happy to gather in the canteen on their morning break and whinge about their respective partners. The object here is not, as it would superficially seem, to console or advise one another about how to improve or remedy the situation. Consider Jen, who has just transferred from Accounts, joins the group one morning and dispenses honest advice about how Gemma and her partner could seek counselling- Jen will soon find herself ostracised from the Morning Canteen Coffee Club, because she does not play by the rules.
The true purpose of the game is to seek reassurance for the shrewd decision Gemma's child ego state has made, to seek a domineering partner who shields her from fear of failure, by holding her back from trying in the first place.
And so it proceeds- Most human activity can be looked at through this lens on a bigger or smaller scale. Things like rape, violence, and addiction can all be seen as forms of a "game" for which the objective is satisfaction for one of the various ego states, between players of the same game, whether winners or losers.
>>5921 >I'd pretty much agree with all that, I think my issue is more to do with people assuming they can apply what I'd regard as quite a "narrow" theory to all human behaviour.
Yes, but in the end, how else are you going to grasp and understand reality... humans have very limited perception of reality, because we can only process so much information at any given time. That's the basic reason why we need models in the first place; because we can't process the deluge of information that is constantly present in the real world.
And models that concern themselves with human behaviour almost always implicitly rely on the law of large numbers; of course a behavioural model cannot predict with absolute certainty how one single person will behave, because there just is no telling; but a good behavioural model will posit likelihoods of human behaviour, and will often go with what's most likely.
So even if a model seems quite narrow, it can in fact be true nonetheless when you compare it with reality. For example, if you say that an economic subject, like a person or a household, tends to want to maximise utility, then that can still mean that many people in reality will do fuck all to "maximise utility", they will spend too much money on overpriced needless things and not give utility much thought at all. But by and large, when you look at all individuals or all households put together, a pattern emerges that the majority will in one way or another try to maximise utility for itself under given circumstances.
"Transaction" models can be equally narrow and can prove equally wrong when applied to a single person; you can be dead wrong if you expect somebody to behave in a certain way just because that's how most people would react. But again, in the end, the greater the number of people that you observe, the greater the likelihood that you will see most transaction models validated.
