Tag: Victoria Pynchon

“on line” was the place mama hung wet laundry – how’s your “Netiquette” airing?

Yeah, those misplaced modifiers are still nagging at me –  and so is the glaring typo I didn’t see until after it went out in my headline.   However, the words on my mind at moment are those “lonely written words” we see on a computer screen when communicating electronically – words that both common sense  and research dictate are easily misinterpreted.

Until shortly before I met Sop, the idea of socializing electronically had never crossed my mind.  Although I did sleep with my laptop much of the year following Katrina, that’s hardly the sort of socializing that’s become so common to email, blogs, and social networking sites.

Unfortunately, my relationship with that laptop had an unhappy ending.  There is no help for a laptop that  falls off a bed, particularly one landing port side with a jump drive installed; however, for the more usual ways of socializing electronically, there is the option of  “netiquette training” :

E-mail is not meant to replace all human contact. E-mail is not meant to be your sole venue of communication… Use e-mail for the day to day stuff, but use your phone when the topic or situation requires for those whose relationships are of importance to you…That’s what real “friends” do!

My “relationship” with that laptop was an important one but we certainly weren’t “friends”.  However, while e-mail is not the only way I communicate with my employees, it is the way I manage the day to day operation of a business with over half the staff working at a distance from the main office.

Consequently, I didn’t need netiquette training or research to tell me the pitfalls of e-mail communication or have to rely on the gifted Learned Hand to know words are  “chameleons”  that “reflect the color of their environment”. Continue reading ““on line” was the place mama hung wet laundry – how’s your “Netiquette” airing?”

Hey, asshole, your “cognitive biases” are showing – Pynchon’s new book adds to SLABBED discussion of cognitive maps

We’ve all got one and we can all be one – but  “an ‘asshole’ is not a person but a behavior“, according to  blogroll friend of SLABBED and author of “A is for Asshole: The Grownups’  ABC’s of Conflict Resolution”, Vickie Pynchon.

“We are all blinded by the part we play in disputes” – Amen!  “Asshole” is a behavioral tango – “not one person but two” with  cognitive biases: “something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality”.

Resolving conflict requires taking the blinders off and accept mutual responsibly for both the conflict and its resolution.  Ouch!  It’s so much easier to keep blinders on and see a conflict as “the other guy’s fault” – a “fundamental attribution error” cognitive bias:

“over-attributing intention and under-attributing circumstance to another’s harm-causing behavior while over-attributing circumstance and under-attributing intention to our own harm-causing behavior”

Although each a form of cognitive bias, “clustering illusions” – “seeing patterns where none exist” – and “confirmation bias” – “selecting from a vast amount of data only that which confirms our pre-existing opinions” – feed “fundamental attribution errors“.

What researchers have found is that whenever someone else’s behavior causes us harm, we tend to assume that person intended to cause us the harm we experience or, at a minimum, caused us harm by virtue of their carelessness in regard to our well-being.

Pynchon, an accomplished professional “neutral”, readily admits “mistakes about the intentions and motivations” of another and “the constraints under which they are working” happen in both personal and professional relationships – and, setting aside the personal, we move to a brief review of the asshole behavior and cognitive biases evident in Katrina-related litigation. Continue reading “Hey, asshole, your “cognitive biases” are showing – Pynchon’s new book adds to SLABBED discussion of cognitive maps”

Flipping the wig on “whiggocracies”

“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi”

When I need words to explain something “Mississippi”, I reach for the last work of the late (and great) Willie Morris, “My Mississippi” – and what words I find! Some, such as those of Faulkner, come as quotes from other Mississippi writers.  The most telling, however, are those words that show the depth of this understanding of this place he called “home”:

“It has been remarked that Mississippi has produced so many fine writers because the state is such a complicated place that much interpretation is required.”

Victoria Pynchon’s recent piece on Mississippi earwigging and Zach Scruggs was the impetus for my calling on Willie.  SLABBED considers Pynchon a friend.  In fact, we hold her  in such regard that the link to her “Settle it Now” Negotion Blog has been a constant on our blogroll and will remain so despite the “h” she inserted in “earwigging” or her need for “interpretation” of  the practice in this “complicated place”.

Here in this “complicated place”, perhaps because so many once lacked the skills to read and write, “earwigging” is not a reflection of a “whiggocracie” but is, instead, an art — a form of the storytelling that, like the run-on sentences often found in “our literature…and music” that boggies all night long — that doesn’t know when to stop.  Yet, it too, was grown “directly out of land and the sense of place – the mark of the land… the love of narrative:

One sees this at some times directly and at other times through a vivid concreteness and emphasis on detail, as in the stories we love to tell…We are talkers.  We talk about ourselves, each other, our ancestors, events, the funny and quirky and bizarre things people do — true stories, more or less, and the richer and more plentiful the detail, the better…Like storytelling, art of whatever form plays a communal role: it draws people together, helps them understand themselves and their common humanity…”

Pynchon’s article focuses on Zach Scruggs’ Motion to Vacate his conviction for Misprision of a Felony, his failure to report the earwigging of Judge Lackey in the case of Jones v Scruggs.  However, in a March 2008 post, Earwigging — A Mississippi Tradition, Steve Eugster wrote of the earwigging by the Plaintiff’s attorney [Grady Tollison] in the Jones case: Continue reading “Flipping the wig on “whiggocracies””