Heuristic or ideological?

[MorkandMindy]

Most of our behaviours are picked up very early in life; our language, what is edible, and whether it is polite to burp at the table.

But how do we learn the more complex behaviours?

Again most are picked up before adulthood. These include how to convince another person, how to get what you want, how to impress, how to get people to like you and so on, the more complex social behaviours.

 

[MorkandMindy]

If your parents were representative of the society you are in, and you are still in essentially the same society, then you picked these things up by experience using the basic heuristic method of trial and error.



But what if your parents were not representative of the society, or what if you move to a substantially different society?

That is to say what if your experience doesn't work, or more likely backfires?

Now you are learning in the school of 'hard knocks'.


.

 

[blackribbon]

There is a lot that is just "born in you"...things like your learning style or your personality. My brother and I were raised in the same family with the same expectations and the same "rules" but our ability to function in society is very different. I am more adaptable and he treats every situation like it is the same.

 

[MorkandMindy]

'The school of hard knocks' is still the trial and error heuristic, but by early adulthood out in the world of work rather than home, it takes longer and is more painful.


There is another way to gain suitable behaviour and that is by learning from others. This could be piecemeal or it could be to pick up an entire ideology.


And along came Campus Crusade for Christ with the Four Spiritual Laws. Three years later I eventually accepted Christ with an Evangelical Anglican pastor. But I never got it to work. There is no agreed Christian theology, there isn't even an agreed biblical theology. I started in the gospels using an IVP Bible study guide and then from the Brethren picked up the Dispensational view of scripture which contradicted the earlier understanding I held and left me completely unclear of the value of the O.T. . Three years later I met American Christian Fundamentalism which could possibly be best summed up by the bumper sticker 'Christians are not perfect just forgiven'. As with most people in the World outside the US I couldn't hack the behaviour of the US Presidents backed by the Fundamentalists. I started to learn Hebrew as the only way to get the truth of the scripture, but owing to someone else who learned NT Greek and Hebrew and worked full time to understand scripture and produce a correct theology for a number of years without success, and my own attempts to get Noah's Flood to work, over the course of three days of uninterrupted thought when my wife was out, I gave up.


But I still needed an ideology since trial and error was taking too long and was too painful.


.

 

[MorkandMindy]

There is a lot that is just "born in you"...things like your learning style or your personality. My brother and I were raised in the same family with the same expectations and the same "rules" but our ability to function in society is very different. I am more adaptable and he treats every situation like it is the same.

Yes, I realised after posting that I had left 'instinct' or 'inborn' out of the first line of Post 1, but I decided to leave it out to keep things simple and because I'm posting about learning rather than about total behaviour.

Instinct puts more into our everyday thinking than I used to be aware of. I've noticed that the witches in Wizard of Oz or wherever have sunken cheeks, and my guess is that over the past millennia most people benefited from avoiding such nearly starving people as they aren't going to give you food and most likely will only take it. I noticed that a three year old girl whose family is friends of ours, latched onto my 10 year old daughter. My daughter is a bit plump and happy and of below child bearing age and therefore likely to be beneficial to the three year old. Millennia ago mothers would die at 30 or 35 in most cases, leaving almost half of their children as orphans and surviving a few more years to become self sufficient would depend on latching onto a suitable older child.

As for your brother, males tend to split tasks into new tasks and repeat tasks, and it may be he mistakenly considers tasks which are actually new to be just repeats.

Alternatively it may be that you benefited at some point by learning to take a more adaptive approach.

Just some guesses - better ideas are always sought.

 

[MorkandMindy]

If I had understood higher social behaviour in terms of early trial and error learning vs adoption of an ideology then I would have understood my second five years in Christianity, where I stayed in one Church, a lot better.


It was an Evangelical Church. I recall one embarrassing moment when after I was picked out as someone who was exceptionally knowledgeable about the Bible, I then made a social faux pas.


Basically that summed up the predicament. Most people, perhaps 95% in that Church of successful well-adjusted people, came through childhood perfectly adjusted for adult life. They didn't need the Bible so they didn't read the Bible.


I was badly in need of any advice I could get so I was a voracious Bible reader. I would read a book at one go. In bits over a few days I read from the very start all the way to the end of Ruth.

 

[MorkandMindy]

My new ideology is based on three rules:


Avoid doing harm

Do good

Purify the mind

 

[MorkandMindy]

My new ideology is based on three rules:


Avoid doing harm

Do good

Purify the mind


.

These are consistent because in order to be clear on what is doing good and to avoid doing harm it is necessary to have a pure mind, and if you do harm it will pollute your mind and doing good is a great way to feel good.


There are many thousands of pages on how people have lived these rules and corollaries of the rules and further clarifications as well such as that yourself and others are treated equally in 'avoid doing harm',


so I've found I'm in violation of the first rule because I work crazy rotating day / night 12 hour shifts. Basically survival is necessary in order to implement the other two rules - I would say that is pretty much common sense, so I've organised my life so I can get off the shift within 7 months.



Sure there are jobs where it is necessary to have people who work through the night. I volunteered in front of everyone in our department in a meeting to do just nights, because it would be better for me than rotating shifts and because it would allow someone with children to avoid doing nights. But it was rejected outright by the manager.


A moan:
The reason is the pay department would have to produce a pay rule for fixed nights and one for fixed 12-hour days and if you know anything about the English class structure you will know that top management will do anything provided it doesn't involve any work. The physical lives of us low down workers can be forfeit falling asleep on the drive home but that isn't enough to compel office staff to do a single hour of work. That's England.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem
solving, learning, and discovery that give a solution which is not
guaranteed to be optimal.


An ideology is a package of ideas.

 

[dayhiker]

Mork ... I also start with do no harm, then I just add love one another. Its worked amazing well ...

 

[TheyCallMeDavid]

Most of our behaviours are picked up very early in life; our language, what is edible, and whether it is polite to burp at the table.

But how do we learn the more complex behaviours?

Again most are picked up before adulthood. These include how to convince another person, how to get what you want, how to impress, how to get people to like you and so on, the more complex social behaviours.

I believe these more complex social behaviors are learned and retained from ones cultural influence --- whether good or bad in addition from how we were raised as well as from our peers . There is an old adage that goes like this :' If someone says something long enough, often enough, and loud enough... the Hearer will eventually adopt it and believe in it' . This works out very effectively from our Mass Media that wants to 'sell us' on whatever ...whether it be materialism, fashions, the latest Movie, the latest electronic gadget, or lifestyles such as casual sex or adultery being portrayed as permissible . Once the Hearer / Viewer has bought into the message hook line and sinker...then it turns into an ideology/philosophy to live by.

When One embraces Christ, his sacrifice for ones sins , and cooperates with Gods Spirit working in him combined with a hunger for Gods Words of instruction on how to live, act, treat others, talk, etc... then a good, healthy, noble , Godly behavior results versus the Worlds standards which are solely based on selfish gain at expense to integrity (Me-centric) .

 

[MorkandMindy]

I believe these more complex social behaviors are learned and retained from ones cultural influence --- whether good or bad in addition from how we were raised as well as from our peers . There is an old adage that goes like this :' If someone says something long enough, often enough, and loud enough... the Hearer will eventually adopt it and believe in it' . This works out very effectively from our Mass Media that wants to 'sell us' on whatever ...whether it be materialism, fashions, the latest Movie, the latest electronic gadget, or lifestyles such as casual sex or adultery being portrayed as permissible . Once the Hearer / Viewer has bought into the message hook line and sinker...then it turns into an ideology/philosophy to live by.

Agreed; that's why I don't have a TV or take newspapers.

When One embraces Christ, his sacrifice for ones sins , and cooperates with Gods Spirit working in him combined with a hunger for Gods Words of instruction on how to live, act, treat others, talk, etc... then a good, healthy, noble , Godly behavior results versus the Worlds standards which are solely based on selfish gain at expense to integrity (Me-centric) .

That's a trap I fell into recently - I slipped into talking about what certain people were doing wrong.

instruction on how to live, act, treat others, talk, etc...

Your input to the posts below would be gratefully received

 

[MorkandMindy]

My new ideology is based on three rules:


Avoid doing harm

Do good

Purify the mind

Mork ... I also start with do no harm, then I just add love one another. Its worked amazing well ...

As I understand it 'love your neighbour as yourself' is love as in 'treat' or be 'kind to', it is an instruction not an emotion.

So I'm guessing your first two rules are the same as mine.



Do you get by without my third rule? (These three rules aren't really mine, someone came up with them 2,500 years ago, they are only 'mine' in the sense that I follow them).

 

[Doctor Strangelove]

Since we are talking about culture and ethics, I would like to recommend the Confucian books The Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning.