What You Know And the Pain It Causes Cognitive dissonance

"Before we try to explain something, we should be sure it actually happened."--Ray Hyman


My son mentioned today that everyone dies of the same thing, a  loss of homeostasis. Which is true. Our bodies rely on many variables to remain within strict parameters, which maintain our homeostasis. Any one of them: body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing capacity and activity -- any of them losing their required value and we are dead. The rest is merely details.

Cognitive dissonance arises when external information contradicts an already held belief.

The way all of us normally deal with this is NOT to rationally compare two competing theses and resolve conflicts using reason and available evidence. Rather, we react in the same way we react to a physical threat. We instinctively fight against information that threatens our beliefs, inventing any means of defense possible.

Aggressive Persuasion Time Distortion. Technique

Name: Time Distortion. / Engage the Future

Type:  Perception Alteration
Medium: In Person or Voice Call - Text is possible but challenging
Chance of Encounter: Med/Low
Typical Target: One-to-One though Mass Media is Possible -- Challenging though
Setup, Conditions, or Environment: Framing highly suggested prior to engagement. 
If campaign requires text, framing requirement becomes even more advised. 
Description of Handling: The handling means an act of influencing public opinion through specific action so manipulated people will have the impression that they are acting according to their own ideas and interests. In fact, they take an idea, or an opinion that does not belong to them, but has been induced by various means. .One of the simplest is the technique of Time Distortion. Researchers today, call this False Memory or Memory Distortion. This technique refers to a decision that the client is trying to take. Speaking (Communicating) to them as if the decision is already made and that it was a pleasant experience and now everything is going to work out, adds to the experience. Also combining the session with pleasing images made with the use of "past tense" makes the new belief seat into memory with less disturbance, and begin to inscribe into the long term memory.  

I've also heard this one referred to as, "It's Just Tense, that's All"
But that was described as more of a Trope than an engagement.

I remember when it happened. I remember when we got the news. The news that 913 people killed themselves in Jonestown. It was so stunning. The anchor man said it deadpan. Nine hundred men, and women, with their children, in a mass suicide during a church service. It really didn't hit. I don't think anyone who heard it that day, got the message. I don't believe we process after a certain degree of atrocity. It's not a shock, really. It's a dumbing. What you hear -- it just doesn't make any sense to you. The words, individually, as each was said, were recognized as words, sure, but they weren't recognizable in that order. I guess, when that sort of limitation is breached, you focus on the banal. So, yeah, this guy who is condemning the jokes about the Kool-aid, this college kid. Sure, I understand the rebuke, but i don't accept it. Even now, it is difficult to grasp - -and there are so many living people who are crushed by tragedy to focus on. I do not accept the reproach of the dead while the living cry out.

Was there something that could have been done about Jonestown?

Mainstream - Hank Green Derision - Propaganda

Robert Earll, who I called Bobby, like everyone else we hung out with, was one of the writers for Ironsides, and then Starsky & Hutch. You know the episode where Starsky's wife dies of cancer? The one that got all those awards? He wrote that -- after his wife died of cancer. That's how writers deal with things like that, we write about them. 

So, anyway, Bobby never felt like he really belonged in Hollywood, making a ton of money and writing for a living. He didn't have a degree. Hell, his only serious schooling was through a correspondence course while he lived in Las Vegas. Nope, not joking at all. It was sort of a strange assemblage of accidents that got one of his assignments into the hands of the producer of Ironsides as well. 

About ten years into a solid career he took a young man to work with him, who wanted to get into to writing TV shows as well. 

Bobby told me that this guy was absolutely insatiable the whole day. 

"He just wouldn't stop! He talked to all the stars, the directors, he even spent more than an hour bugging the stunts guys, asking how they did things. I was so frustrated I could have screamed and whacked him with something blunt!"  Then Bobby looked at me sideways, "You know why I was really mad though?"

"I'll bite, why?" 

"Because that kid had more fun at my job in an afternoon, than I've had there in the last ten years." 

Hank Green, my son tells me, is still getting razed by the mainstream news media about his visit to the Whitehouse. When my son told me about this I thought of that story Bobby told me. I would be willing to bet a royalty check that not one of those CNN reporters has a selfie with the president. 

That and they're scared shitless. 

a Touch of Aristotle - You Tweet - I Tweet

Do I know more than You? Maybe. Probably not. I'm so focused into narrow areas of attention that I might know more about a narrow segment of a topic than you do, but current events? Like, what is happening on my front lawn? Eh... not so much. Perfect example is that I ordered speakers for my laptop two weeks ago. Just this morning I realized that they didn't arrive. So I got on to the website to check it out. They were delivered ten days ago to the address I lived at 15 years ago.

However, there are a few places I probably have more fun. Well. My kind of fun. For example, this is probably close to how you Tweet.

The Twitter of Every Day Use

And this is more my style (see how they are all running around in a circle chasing tweets that upset them?... ah.. the teas are fun).

This image is created using NodeXL
Which is a plugin for Excel which connects to
Twitter, and then allows you to create functionality

The Malleable Variance of What We Call Time

In his Rhetoric, Aristotle acknowledges that it would be better if we could make our case without either browbeating or flattering the audience; nothing should matter except "the bare facts." He laments, "other things affect the result considerably, owing to the defects of our hearers."

Your perception of time does not adhere to "world time." You might have the opinion that I should have said, 'does not always adhere to world time', but that's a lie. Your sense of time is as easily disturbed as a puddle of mud, and just as transparent.

If a man with a bass voice reads a script at exactly the same speed as a man with a tenor voice, the bass voice feels slower, by a notable degree.

When your body temperature is high, your sense of time is also slowed. In one experiment, subjects with fevers were asked to count to 60 at one number per second. Without exception, they counted much faster.

Having a low body temperature  you would count slower, as the sense of time moves much faster.

Under the influence of blue light, time is underestimated -- which is why nightclubs use it, to give you the sense that you really haven't been there that long.

Under the long wavelengths of red light, time is overestimated and every thing feels like it is in slow motion.

Noam Chomsky and the Engineering of Consent

Thought Control in a Democratic Society