Right. It's very easy for people who are entirely fluent in many social contexts to become socially crippled when they're in someone else's schema.
An American woman meets her Persian boyfriend's mother for the first time. It's at the American's house. As is customary in both cultures, the host offers her guest some tea, and the guest politely declines.
Being an American and accustomed to people being fairly direct, the host does not bring tea. Ten minutes later the Persian mother is very confused and a little offended; where is the tea?
Both are being utterly polite and trying to put the other at ease, both are highly proficient at doing this in their own culture. Neither see anything going wrong until the offense has been given.
And I need to hit the books, obviously (psychology being my major ... ouch, the tragic definitions .... "attuning" social intelligence is kind of tragic)
Attuning carries the meaning of identifying with, mirroring. Social intelligence plays into that but attuning isn't necessary in every instance of social intelligence
I know a little about mirror neurons and isopraxism. Even if just a little.
I'm a fan of Michael Shermer (big, big skeptic name in case you don't know him). He has to cast everything, everything under a microscope and uses the same cold tools. Refusing to believe in anything he couldn't explain via science was what really alienated me.
It's not a matter of ditching science. Place it on the table for an hour while you read something, or a day while you research, or a few days while you grasp something new.
It will be there when you want it again.
I wouldn't go to a conference like that (well, I might but most might not), but it doesn't leave you when you turn away for a moment
@BESW you really like FATE? But you switch systems too, don't you?
Many consider science to be all-encompassing, and it's hard to compare that to systems which possess clear (if often poorly demarcated) boundaries of usefulness.
But even then, unless one knows something deeper than the surface - science says the human has no organs, until that human is dissected/split open and then we find that humans have organs
the suspension of disbelief is in order to get into the topic deeper. Science bars that
Learn by doing. Then, use science to learn, scientifically, about what you learned
Example: Tarot cards (sorry to any prominent diviners whom this might possibly offend)
Skeptically analyzing the whole spread, one will learn nothing as they are drawing the cards.
But, through just doing it instead of checking each step via the scientific method
one can find that Tarot cards can and often do have some scientific merit, at least the process of 'divining' and assessing certain situations
Sure. What meant to say is that there are extremes to the ways people are thinking.
When you believe too much, you start believing in alien abductions, etc. (these are the so called "weak temporal lobes" - people not being able to distinguish a dream from reality)
There are the schizotypal ....
And on the other end of the sppectrum are the rigid people who deny their very own soul ...
You were advocating for balance. And that's nice :)
Wow, lots and lots of woo-woo in here recently. If this was all for role-playing's sake, I have no issue with inserting whatever reality you feel like inserting into a game. In fact, as a pretty staunch skeptic, I am a pretty big fan of Lovecraft (well, not his dialogue) and have tried time and time again to get into fantasy because I really do like the milieus created.
The basic problem here is that in fact there is just the one reality here in real life. In RPGs, fine, great, have all the realities you want. Go crazy. Do the same in literature. It's fun. In the real world, though, if you want to demonstrate that Tarot cards do anything other than provide a means for folks to do cold reading and the like, I'm going to need to see documented studies from peer-reviewed journals.
It's as simple as perspective. Since we are limited to our own perception in this given objective reality, we have our own intellectual faculties to work with and no one else's. Communication can bridge that but it's only as good as the tool with which we use, whether language or otherwise
Tarot cards provide a random (I believe) tool for discussion. "Which career should I choose?" If tackled with the idea that the cards are nothing more than ideas presented in a fashion only as ordered as the person interpreting them, it can be a useful tool.
Not in providing "divine guidance" (again, sorry for any adamant diviners around) but for providing another angle with which to see things, with which to analyze the situation.
With the lens of skepticism on, the mind won't consider how this card could be tied into this other facet of their life, it's just chaotic mumbo jumbo
see it as an externalized, randomized thought map. The interpreter and the asker are the two important pieces of the equation, the cards just provide a perspective
The same could be made for I Ching or Pooh Sticks.
I won't disagree that they can be somewhat useful as a way of spurring that conversation, but I suspect that for a lot of people who use them, the idea that there is some sort of mystical power behind them is why they're useful. If you want to choose to believe that, great; I don't think tarot readers need to be a. be on the list of medical providers, for example,
Tea leaves... It's not about communing with a higher power necessarily. It could be about communing with higher personal faculties, or even just the same thoughts cast in another light
and b. if they step over that line into defrauding people (I don't know that a simple agreed-to Tarot reading quite constitutes fraud) they need to be prosecuted.
and there is also the unfortunate reality that people look to "alternative solutions" instead of established medical science, and that's a real problem
I don't believe they should be on a list of medical providers either. I think that the tool could be used well by medical providers, though. Think Rohrschach (sp) blots
@JohnCraven It doesn't, of course I didn't follow the Miss Cleo case at all.
@JohnCraven I will disagree there. Point-in-case: F. M. Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique
Rorschach blots were specifically used to see whether or not people saw vaginas and stuff in "random" ink blots (which were actually an original set of 10 or so pictures) and to classify folks as deviant or not based on that
of course medical science isn't perfect. Science is full of people committing fraud, suppressing studies, and using rhetorical devices rather than good science to defeat competing claims.
It's also the best thing we have available to us to ferret out knowledge from supposition
Then ditching the Rohrshach analogy lol. Free association - when used as a tool, any divination technique can provide another alternative. When used as an oracle, any tool can be dangerous.
Knowledge comes from experience, too - skeptically denying one's self the experience will color the knowledge gained
A person can have a hypnogogic hallucination (a waking dream) and to them it can seem as real as anything else, but we know that it isn't actually "real" in the sense that there wasn't a dragon walking across their room that night, at least probably not, and that this is a documented thing that happens to people
It's sort of the same with knowledge, but knowledge obtained via scientific inquiry at least makes some attempts to eliminate bias
@Metool happens. always have back up plans...like boardgames (which is what we're doing tonight, not because of attendence issues, but more because it's the first time in weeks we're actually meeting issues)
[Is saddled with trying to create a modern-fantasy setting in which to set his wife's heroic-action character. Thinking about hanging the whole thing on a war...]
@Phil Legend can handle any setting genre as long as the group is comfortable in the 'heroic action' genre; Legend characters are competent, powerful, and dangerous.
@BESW I had but my wife has specifically requested something more in the vein of, say, Yasmine Galenorn. I think Dresden Files would also count but I don't actually know because I haven't read any of them. What I'm thinking is that I want to do an idea that there's been a sudden re-emergence of magic for some reason, relating to a war between two great powers.
I'm almost thinking about doing Faeries vs. Demons
I'd been contemplating Fey vs. Demons just so that when I introduce anti-fey factions it makes sense. I mean, yes, faeries are better than demons but they're still assholes
Mundane guys are trying to get their hands on magical power through items/rituals/treaties/bindings/etc, and the hero is one of the only people who might be able to stop them. Then throw in the reactions of the various magical factions.
Nasty horrible things that are trying to take over the world by causing fear and terror. They weaken the boundary between reality and dreams, and people's nightmares become real
My thought is that the conflict broke out when Faerie refused to pay its Tithe. This is still not actually common knowledge - the Hidden Folk aren't admitting it, and demons aren't precisely talking, but the war started when Hell wasn't paid
But that beggars the question of why it would spill over onto Earth.
Faerie started looking for recruits who could use iron against the dwellers of the Pit? The psychic force of the conflict shattered normal dimensional barriers?
@Lord_Gareth Seriously, Captain America. The reason supernatural stuff is running rampant is that mundane bad guys are poking the Otherworld with pointy sticks.
Captain America plots are basically "Nazis poking the supernatural with a science stick." Sometimes the supernatural pokes back. Run with that, combined with the idea that the supernatural has massive internal conflict as well.
(And it gives the potential for a mundane hit-it-with-a-stick solution to the problem --Destroy the Science Things-- although it'll probably require a lot of fast talking to get to that point.)
