group dynamics -- good article

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: GUEST,Mario
Date: 12 Jan 05 - 03:36 PM

What I find interesting about the article is:

changing your identity is really weird. And when the community understands that you've been doing it and you're faking, that is seen as a huge and violent transgression. And they will expend an astonishing amount of energy to find you and punish you. So identity is much less slippery than the early literature would lead us to believe.

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 12 Jan 05 - 03:12 PM

I'd not wholly agree with Dave there - it's too easy to come up with situations where some act intended to harm someone might in the event turn out to benefit them. A thug puts someone in hospital, where they meet the nurse who turns out to be the live of their life; someone makes a rival lose their job by some false accusation, and he or she promptly gets a much better job. In neither of those cases would the happy outcome serve to justify the malevolent action. Or it could be the other way round - you help someone go on holiday, and some totally unexpected accident arises, and they get killed.

What matters is your intention, together with the consequences whch can be reasonably be anticipated.

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 12 Jan 05 - 02:54 PM

I had a religion professor who put it this way:

"If the end doesn't justify the means, what does justify the means?"

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Jan 05 - 12:31 PM

More on "The end justifies the means."

If a means (that is, any means, any action) is ever to be justified (or found not to be justified) it will be by the end it produces.

I need to make that clear: It's the real world end that results, not the intended end, that does or does not justify. And that's a problem, because it's often difficult to see down the road to what the real end is going to be. Among other things to be said, the "real end" is going to be much broader than the nominal or intended end, because it's virtually impossible to do one isolated thing.

Therefore, in contemplating an action, the end to be served must be looked at very carefully, and in depth through several branchings of causation.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Jan 05 - 04:03 PM

Pedantic thread drift: Understood properly, the end does justify the means, and the other way round. The idea behind it isn't that having a good purpose means it's all right doing bad things, but that, if you are doing something for a good purpose, ordinary uninmportant things become righteous; and if you are doing it for a bad purpose, those very same things become evil. Like driving - there's a big difference between drivig an ambulance and driving a getaway car, but it's the same skill involved.
..........................
But I quite accept that by now "the end justifies the means" is an expression which has been distorted and degraded. However, though the degraded version is always fashionable among a certain type of mentality, and it gets adopted as a fashion item by a lot of people or as a way of sounding smart, I think that the reverse attitude ("We Before Me") is actually a lot more prevalent, in actions if not always in words, than is sometimes recognised.   

I think that is reflected by the way that the Mudcat does manage to get along, and get back on track, and that article helps clarify the processes involved.

There are always going to be some egomaniacs around, and the important thing is to have ways of responding to them as a nuisance, and limiting that nuisance - but making sure never to set up systems which end up with the egomaniacs running the place, which is what all too often happens in the big world.

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: MAG
Date: 10 Jan 05 - 01:19 AM

I'm glad y'all found the article worth reading.

When we're faced with just plain anti-group behavior, his thinking on rights of the group comes into play.

Last night I heard an artist on Afro-Pop whose new album was titled "We Before Me."

We live in a culture where you see shirts proclaiming:

The end justifies the means

Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing

If the bird flies away, chase it down and kill it

etc etc etc

We need an alternative.

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: diesel
Date: 09 Jan 05 - 07:05 PM

Thanks MAG !

Diesel

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Jan 05 - 05:32 PM

Thanks for posting this. It ties in remarkably well with the way things have happened with the Mudcat over the years. I'm sure I'll come back to it and read it again and ponder it. It also has a lot of pointers to stuff I'd like to follow up. Including more of Clay Shirky's writing on the Internet.

"Obvious"? Well, perhaps that's really another way of saying true to life. I think it throws up a lot of issues that could help make sense of some of the problems the Mudcat has run into. I think it's an article that a lot of people here could benefit from reading.

And it's got a wicked snse of dry humour at some points. "Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.)

One slightly sobering point, when Shirky mentions something as "written in the middle of the last century", and I'm thinking Dickensian times - and then the penny drops, that is my century he's referring to...

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: freda underhill
Date: 08 Jan 05 - 05:28 PM

this article is Very interesting and have saved it - thanks for posting it!

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 08 Jan 05 - 03:49 PM

MAG, I've no way to send you a P.M., so I'm taking this opprtunity to say THANKS in your thread for the CD of your Wednesday Night Band. Great music that you all can be proud of. If I could walk better, I'd be dancing!!

Art

Subject: RE: group dynamics -- good article
From: mack/misophist
Date: 07 Jan 05 - 03:46 PM

Interesting, but most of it seemed obvious.

Subject: group dynamics -- good article
From: MAG
Date: 06 Jan 05 - 11:26 PM

I will trust that this blicky comes out right when I submit.

This is a long article but I found it so trenchant I decided to link it anyway. It comes from my other (professional) life.
The first part explains why the purist anarchists and the simply psychotic will always be with us, and what the Tyranny of Structurelessness will do to any group, real time or virtual. It also explains why the anonymous and pseudonymous guests have, generally, a bad reputation. And also why those dedicated in-group elves are so very very necessary.

I hope the link works.


http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

href="http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html">http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html