I totally expected this to be about the Dutch region of Belgium.
I thought it was something like 'a place being turned into a country because its politically convenient for a great power'. Kind of like 'Finlandization'.
Flanderization
131–137 of 137 posts
Re: Flanderization
#132This is one of those moments that makes me fall in love with the internet all over again. I've thought about this idea (without knowing there was a term for it!) wrt aging in real life. So many people seem to become increasingly caricature as they get older. The guy who likes woodworking and European travel becomes the embodiment of woodworking and European travel. It's all he talks about. His kids roll their eyes at…
As time goes you might find your eigenvectors. Sometimes it takes a change of norms, sometimes it takes a change of bases. But things might be simpler when you live your eigenvectors :)
Thank you for yes-anding the linear algebra metaphor :)
After I wrote the original comment, I started thinking, even if you accept that hobbies / skills / preferences are a vector, what is the model where it makes sense to multiply vectors together? Then I thought, what if every time people encountered each other there was a kind of vector multiplication, about the salient aspects of their vectors? And this resultant "encounter vector" served to motivate the encounter, and potentially update each person's original "personality" vector? And day-to-day life could sometimes result in self-multiplication, depending on what you're doing.
That seemed fruitful, though obv very incomplete. I mention it in case you want to return volley :)
Re: Flanderization
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good question. My take is that the quote from one of the sibling comments -- where someone's dad talks about aging as 'boiling down to your own true essence' -- is actually wrong. I think there's a lot less 'true essence' and a lot more path dependency. In my example, is woodworking and European travel true essence? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think so. I think it could have just as easily been someth…
I think it depends on the person and there's no good answer. For some folks it will be sticking with what they know and trying to "exploit" it as deep as possible, while for others it will be "exploring" as wide as possible trying everything out, and for everyone else it'll be some mix of both. To counter the anti-caricature penalty, there's also the stereotype of the older person that never found something to anchor…
I like this framing. The sweet spot would be finding a balance between having enough to cohere / give purpose / motivate, but not enough to capture all activity. So you'd want to monitor the situation and course-correct depending on what was happening.
And, like you said, some people would be happy being totally captured by woodworking / European travel, and wouldn't see it as a problem. And maybe some people would be happy in the anchorless, 100% drifting way, although I personally am suspicious of that -- if you have to choose, being a caricature is probably better than being completely un-anchored.
Re: Flanderization
#134Re: Flanderization
#135Re: Flanderization
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
As time goes you might find your eigenvectors. Sometimes it takes a change of norms, sometimes it takes a change of bases. But things might be simpler when you live your eigenvectors :)
Thank you for yes-anding the linear algebra metaphor :) After I wrote the original comment, I started thinking, even if you accept that hobbies / skills / preferences are a vector, what is the model where it makes sense to multiply vectors together? Then I thought, what if every time people encountered each other there was a kind of vector multiplication, about the salient aspects of their vectors? And this resultant…
There might be some tricky bits to that: most people's domains aren't going to be the same and the projections will result in empty results. In some cases a few bases are shared and there's something to work with, in other cases it might be possible for one party to find.. I guess some homomorphism, that would enable some projections to be non-null.
It could be the case that it's not the usual way things go however, and instead of finding a perfect transformation instead an imperfect one loses some of the information (for example if you and I were to have this exchange in a language where one of us isn't comfortable and the other is). And I guess there's also the question of what to do with the resulting projections we get when we do get some.. are they part of feedback loops around the measure of engagement between people, perhaps? Can the measure of that projection become actionable in any meaningful way to either party? etc.
Re: Flanderization
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've thought about this idea (without knowing there was a term for it!) I used to call it the "Kramer Effect", much like you, without knowing it was called Flanderization and was using it in the early 2000s to describe my displeasure with the character Joey from Friends. Joey went from kind of low intellect to full retard by the end of the show and very inexplicably.
So why didn't you call it Joey Effect? Did Kramer also go through the exaggeration process throughout the series?
There's many Joeys but there's only one Kramer. lol