https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_analysis#Outline
...are grown-up children, utterly irresponsible; not immoral but unmoral; they “please to live and live to please” themselves. They do not realise that their actions may prove costly to others and therefore do not count the cost. They are children of impulse not of calculation. [1]
then TA would be completely dandy, but I kind of thought the initial ideal, at least, was that people would attempt to stay in A<->A Straight Talk modes. Should we judge Transactional Analysis by what Berne wrote (TA as antimeme), or by what everyone read or claimed to have read (TA as meme)?
"...your real dandy is not an ordinary man and must not be judged by common standards. He stands outside and above the ordinary rules of life and conduct; he has not any conscience, and questions of morality do not affect him. All that is for us to do in viewing such a one as D’Orsay is to weigh his physical and mental gifts, and to examine the uses to which he put them, to look to the opportunities which were given to him and the advantage which he took of them." [1]
Dandyism as sociopathy? It certainly has a pocketbook-dependent valence: poor dandies are trashy; rich ones, classy.
> I don't play accurately —any one can play accurately— but I play with wonderful expression. —AM
[0] cf the Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans, which claims this behaviour wasn't just the 1970s, it's the national character.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56581/56581-h/56581-h.htm
EDIT: I prefer https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56581/56581-h/images/illus5.... (who needs a marshall's baton when you have a hunting crop?), but have to admit D'O---y may even have inspired a predecessor of our age's bobbleheads: https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1221047
as a contrived example to argue that point, the advantage has been adapted into YC’s metric for equity transferees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9239203
In order to keep things simple, lets forget abt memes, because i’m more interested in the failure modes of Straight Talk no BS OG TA.
attributes - things you were born with
accomplishments - things you have via practice (paid the time)
acquisitions - things you have via purchase (paid the cash)
[and I'm calling Altman's anecdote weak sauce; I agree it's hustle not hack. Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c412hqucHKw ]
EDIT: showing up on the client's doorstep has been done by salescritters since the day after commission was invented. A hack involves exploiting a property of a system that no one had previously realised exploitable. (Note here that despite popular usage, I only consider most computer crackers to be airquote "hackers".)
> The somber picture presented in Parts I and II of this book, in which human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait, is a commonplace but not the final answer. For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as "togetherness." This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.
(IIUC after hearing "all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared", Michael Scott would be likely to retort "that's what she said")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41481141
insanity-inducing games are very intriguing! for the purposes of formalization
I'll be low on bandwidth for the next few days, but will try to think of insanity inducing games. The glass bead game being good for pareidolia, I could imagine that if one played it to the point of seeing everything connected to everything else might lead to institutionalisation about as often as to enlightenment?
(Mark Vonnegut's experience as detailed in The Eden Express (1975) suggest that mixing psychedelics with stress is an insanity-inducing game)
Here is a real life (albeit informal) example: when I was still in the Old Country, a professional trainer told me the following (translated here to the notation of [Yoshikawa et al 2018]) about his process of "tuning up" horses that someone else (usually the client themself) has messed up:
1. Be an expert: this means (at least implicitly) knowing R*
2. Ask the horse to do a task involving Q. If the horse does it perfectly, the owner needs work. (if you like dealing with humans and also know R'*, start over by teaching the owner at step 1 and Q'; if you don't like dealing with humans or don't know R'*, pass the buck to a colleague who does both)
3. At this point determine if the horse either (a) doesn't realise you wanted Q, (b) can't do Q because they're insufficiently fit, (c) can't do Q because they don't know how, or (d) could have done Q but doesn't want to. In the cases of (a) or (d), the remedy is (for the purposes of this example) straightforward. In the cases of (b) or (c) it's more complex, leading to:
4. Walk the antimatroid A(R*) to determine which subsets Q_p the horse can physically do and Q_m the horse knows how to do; in the generic case this will give you a task Q_1 which can be trained having some subset of Q_p ⋃ Q_m as prereqs with a single novel q (unit inference?) to work on.
5. Until the owner says "good enough" (common) or can't ask for Q_n (common, see step 2) or you reach Q (rare), train the other steps of a minimal path Q_2...Q [Exercise: does such a path exist?]