#behaviorism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #behaviorism, aggregated by home.social.
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“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn”*…
In what does our personhood consist? From what/where does it come? João de Pina Cabral unpacks the seminal thinking of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that suggest that a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others…
It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’…
[de Pina Cabral traces the development of Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, starting with Plato’s concept of methexis; elaborates on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas; and traces te advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that support them…]
… the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, [persons] find themselves as members of families, associations, [socialities], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from their world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves…
How does one become a person? “We” before “I”: “To be is to participate,” from @aeon.co.
A (if not the) next question: how does personhood emerge when the formative interactions are increasingly mediated/attentuated by technology?
* Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3
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As we get together, we might send behaviorist birthday greetings to a man whose work focused on how one might train the “persons” who emerge: Kenneth Spence; he was born on this date in 1907. A psychologist, he worked to construct a comprehensive theory of behavior to encompass conditioning and other simple forms of learning and behavior modification.
Spence attempted to establish a precise, mathematical formulation to describe the acquisition of learned behavior, trying to measure simple learned behaviors (e.g., salivating in anticipation of eating). Much of his research focused on classically conditioned, easily measured, eye-blinking behavior in relation to anxiety and other factors.
One of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
#anthropology #behavior #Behaviorism #corporatePersonhood #culture #FranzBoas #history #identity #KennethSpence #learning #LucienLévyBruhl #person #Psychology #Science -
In 1938, B.F. Skinner began to advocate a radical scientific approach to studying and controlling animal behavior. #Poetry #Science #History #Behaviorism #Skinner (https://sharpgiving.com/Sharp/thebookofscience/items/p1938a.html)
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https://newsmast.social/@newsmast/114613185578761343
long post? #socialscience #socialsciences #economics #geography #psychology #Economicmodels #clinicalpsychology #cognitivepsychology #developmentalpsychology #economist #sociology #statistics #anthropology #datascience #SocialPsychology #politicalscience #austerity #recession #ECB #FED #IMF #WTO #psychotherapy #cognitivebehaviouraltherapy #CBT #pyschoanalysis #behaviorism #pyschology #neuroscience #DataVisualisation #geopolitics #particlephysics #QuantumMechanics #physics #quantumphysics #molecularphysics #nuclearphysics #modernphysics
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Grant Application Questions and Answers
Here are our answers to the questions on a grant we recently applied for.
Table of Contents
- History
- Root Causes
- Action & Lasting Effect
- Constituent-Led
- Community-Wide
- Organizational Structure and Decision Making
- Movement Building
- Funding and Community Support
- Community Feedback
- 3-5 Milestones
History
When did your group come together and why? Share major accomplishments and tell us about your recent activities, successes, and learning opportunities.
Stimpunks was created to forge the way for educational inclusion and to give our community the means to survive and to thrive. We as a disabled and neurodivergent run organization had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We had to create our own care systems, because “we realized that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” “Responsibility for the survival of entire communities lies with us.”
Learn more about our history, our successes, and our current activities on our front page and our Now page. We put a lot of time into long-form scrollytelling (scrolling + storytelling) and will be sharing links to our website as part of this application process. You’ve never seen a website like ours. Check it out. Professors have told us they use our website to teach digital composition.
Root Causes
What is the specific problem or injustice your group is trying to solve? What are the root causes of the problem (racism, poverty, sexism, etc.)?
We live in an age of mass behaviorism, rampant ableism, and unvarnished eugenics.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/ableism/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/behaviorism/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/eugenics/
Schools are inaccessible to us because of “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/equity/
When you or your kid is diagnosed as neurodivergent, almost all of the professional advice you get from education and healthcare is steeped in deficit ideology and the pathology paradigm.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/deficit-ideology/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/pathology-paradigm/
The logistics of disability and difference in a structurally ableist and inaccessible world poisoned by bad framing are exhausting, often impossible. We are perpetual hackers, mappers, and testers of our systems by necessity of survival.
“I would like to honour all the autistic people who survive the care system somehow.
“All those who survive extreme ‘therapy’.
“All those who are brought to their knees, reading hellish descriptions of their loved people.
“And all who did not survive this onslaught.”
—Ann Memmott
Part of surviving the onslaught is naming the systems of power.
https://stimpunks.org/pathways/systems-of-power/
Action & Lasting Effect
What is your overall strategy for solving the injustice described above? What social, economic, political, or cultural institutions or systems will you work to change in order to fight the injustice? What actions will come out of your work? What will be different in your community and our society because of your work?
IF you do direct services to meet the needs of your community, how do you connect that work to organizing, action & systems change?
IF you are creating an alternative to a current system/policy/institution, please tell us why and describe how that will make real change for your community.
We tackle injustice through two avenues, education and direct giving to individuals.
Our mutual aid grants and creator grants give money directly to individuals to use as they need.
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/direct-support-to-individuals/
We develop educational programming directed at these institutions:
- Public and private education
- Human services
- Psychiatry
- Academia and autism research
- And more.
Our emancipatory research efforts focus on the sweet spot of digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. We improve the scientific experience for the disabled and the neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.
https://stimpunks.org/research/activist/
In addition to educating those in existing systems and institutions, we have created our own anti-ableist learning spaces compatible with neurodiversity and disability. These spaces use the best of progressive pedagogy to avoid the problems that exclude us from public and private education.
Constituent-Led
Who is most impacted by the injustice you are fighting? How are those most affected actively providing leadership and direction for your work? How do you identify & develop new leaders?
Neurodivergent and disabled people are most impacted by the ableism we fight.
As part of our mission, we hire neurodivergent and disabled people and invest in their professional development. We don’t think of administrative costs as “overhead”, though we are mindful of how much we spend. We consider administrative costs a component of our mission. We pay living wages to those who help us run the organization. We include folks in our software subscriptions so that they have the tools to do work. We introduce folks to the rhythms of distributed work and team work so that they can take these skills with them wherever they go.
Community-Wide
How does your organization define diversity within your constituency? How do you ensure that everyone is represented in your organization – especially those with less privilege in your community? In addition to filling out the diversity chart, describe any activities, education, or actions your organization has taken in this area. Also explain any progress or set-backs in this area.
We outline our notions of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging as well as the major obstacles to them on this page:
https://stimpunks.org/2025/01/30/deib-and-their-adversaries/
Organizational Structure and Decision Making
Who decides what kind of work your group does? What is the decision-making process? How are you organized (staff, board, volunteers, leaders)? How are your decisionmakers accountable to the larger community? If you have a fiscal agent, please explain the relationship.
We reject hierarchy. We use prosocial principles, restorative practices, transformative justice, and an advice process. We encourage omnidirectional learning, competency networks, and a “Default to open” philosophy. We use the NeurodiVenture operating modeled.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/advice-process/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/prosocial/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/restorative-practices/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/transformative-justice/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/niche-construction/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/competency-network/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/omni-directional-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/neurodiventure/
Movement Building
How does your group see itself as part of a larger movement for social change? How does your work connect with other social change issues and communities? Describe the most important coalitions, collaborations or networks that you participate in. Include your organization’s role.
We actively participate in the greater neurodiversity and disability rights movements and are part of the ever expanding Autistic rhizome.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/autistic-rhizome/
Our allies include:
Funding and Community Support
Please describe your current fundraising activities. How does your community support your organization? How do you plan to sustain your future work? If you have any committed or pending grants, please list them, if applicable.
We do fundraising through our website and peer-to-peer campaigns as well as events.
Our community helps with peer-to-peer fundraising.
We plan to sustain our future work by continuing peer-to-peer fundraising and applying for grants with the help of our partners at Point B(e) Strategies.
Community Feedback
How do you integrate community feedback into your work?
We default to open. We run our organization in the open in our community Discord and on our website. We iterate openly, create feedback loops, and continuously integrate that feedback using methods we developed in open source project management.
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/feedback-loop/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/iteration/
https://stimpunks.org/fieldguide/communication/
3-5 Milestones
List 3-5 milestones your organization aims to achieve with this grant over the coming year. Please include detailed plans on how you intend to reach each milestone. For example: “By July 2025, we intend to specific milestone, and we plan to achieve this by detailed action 1 and detailed action 2, etc.
Our Objectives and Key Results are listed on our Now page.
#ableism #accessibility #adviceProcess #autisticRhizome #behaviorism #belonging #community #competencyNetwork #defaultToOpen #deficitIdeology #diversity #equity #eugenics #inclusion #nicheConstruction #omniDirectionalLearning #prosocial #restorativePractices #transformativeJustice
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Grant Application Questions and Answers
Here are our answers to the questions on a grant we recently applied for.
Table of Contents
- History
- Root Causes
- Action & Lasting Effect
- Constituent-Led
- Community-Wide
- Organizational Structure and Decision Making
- Movement Building
- Funding and Community Support
- Community Feedback
- 3-5 Milestones
History
When did your group come together and why? Share major accomplishments and tell us about your recent activities, successes, and learning opportunities.
Stimpunks was created to forge the way for educational inclusion and to give our community the means to survive and to thrive. We as a disabled and neurodivergent run organization had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We had to create our own care systems, because “we realized that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” “Responsibility for the survival of entire communities lies with us.”
Learn more about our history, our successes, and our current activities on our front page and our Now page. We put a lot of time into long-form scrollytelling (scrolling + storytelling) and will be sharing links to our website as part of this application process. You’ve never seen a website like ours. Check it out. Professors have told us they use our website to teach digital composition.
Root Causes
What is the specific problem or injustice your group is trying to solve? What are the root causes of the problem (racism, poverty, sexism, etc.)?
We live in an age of mass behaviorism, rampant ableism, and unvarnished eugenics.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/ableism/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/behaviorism/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/eugenics/
Schools are inaccessible to us because of “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/equity/
When you or your kid is diagnosed as neurodivergent, almost all of the professional advice you get from education and healthcare is steeped in deficit ideology and the pathology paradigm.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/deficit-ideology/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/pathology-paradigm/
The logistics of disability and difference in a structurally ableist and inaccessible world poisoned by bad framing are exhausting, often impossible. We are perpetual hackers, mappers, and testers of our systems by necessity of survival.
“I would like to honour all the autistic people who survive the care system somehow.
“All those who survive extreme ‘therapy’.
“All those who are brought to their knees, reading hellish descriptions of their loved people.
“And all who did not survive this onslaught.”
—Ann Memmott
Part of surviving the onslaught is naming the systems of power.
https://stimpunks.org/pathways/systems-of-power/
Action & Lasting Effect
What is your overall strategy for solving the injustice described above? What social, economic, political, or cultural institutions or systems will you work to change in order to fight the injustice? What actions will come out of your work? What will be different in your community and our society because of your work?
IF you do direct services to meet the needs of your community, how do you connect that work to organizing, action & systems change?
IF you are creating an alternative to a current system/policy/institution, please tell us why and describe how that will make real change for your community.
We tackle injustice through two avenues, education and direct giving to individuals.
Our mutual aid grants and creator grants give money directly to individuals to use as they need.
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/direct-support-to-individuals/
We develop educational programming directed at these institutions:
- Public and private education
- Human services
- Psychiatry
- Academia and autism research
- And more.
Our emancipatory research efforts focus on the sweet spot of digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. We improve the scientific experience for the disabled and the neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.
https://stimpunks.org/research/activist/
In addition to educating those in existing systems and institutions, we have created our own anti-ableist learning spaces compatible with neurodiversity and disability. These spaces use the best of progressive pedagogy to avoid the problems that exclude us from public and private education.
Constituent-Led
Who is most impacted by the injustice you are fighting? How are those most affected actively providing leadership and direction for your work? How do you identify & develop new leaders?
Neurodivergent and disabled people are most impacted by the ableism we fight.
As part of our mission, we hire neurodivergent and disabled people and invest in their professional development. We don’t think of administrative costs as “overhead”, though we are mindful of how much we spend. We consider administrative costs a component of our mission. We pay living wages to those who help us run the organization. We include folks in our software subscriptions so that they have the tools to do work. We introduce folks to the rhythms of distributed work and team work so that they can take these skills with them wherever they go.
Community-Wide
How does your organization define diversity within your constituency? How do you ensure that everyone is represented in your organization – especially those with less privilege in your community? In addition to filling out the diversity chart, describe any activities, education, or actions your organization has taken in this area. Also explain any progress or set-backs in this area.
We outline our notions of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging as well as the major obstacles to them on this page:
https://stimpunks.org/2025/01/30/deib-and-their-adversaries/
Organizational Structure and Decision Making
Who decides what kind of work your group does? What is the decision-making process? How are you organized (staff, board, volunteers, leaders)? How are your decisionmakers accountable to the larger community? If you have a fiscal agent, please explain the relationship.
We reject hierarchy. We use prosocial principles, restorative practices, transformative justice, and an advice process. We encourage omnidirectional learning, competency networks, and a “Default to open” philosophy. We use the NeurodiVenture operating modeled.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/advice-process/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/prosocial/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/restorative-practices/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/transformative-justice/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/niche-construction/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/competency-network/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/omni-directional-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/neurodiventure/
Movement Building
How does your group see itself as part of a larger movement for social change? How does your work connect with other social change issues and communities? Describe the most important coalitions, collaborations or networks that you participate in. Include your organization’s role.
We actively participate in the greater neurodiversity and disability rights movements and are part of the ever expanding Autistic rhizome.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/autistic-rhizome/
Our allies include:
Funding and Community Support
Please describe your current fundraising activities. How does your community support your organization? How do you plan to sustain your future work? If you have any committed or pending grants, please list them, if applicable.
We do fundraising through our website and peer-to-peer campaigns as well as events.
Our community helps with peer-to-peer fundraising.
We plan to sustain our future work by continuing peer-to-peer fundraising and applying for grants with the help of our partners at Point B(e) Strategies.
Community Feedback
How do you integrate community feedback into your work?
We default to open. We run our organization in the open in our community Discord and on our website. We iterate openly, create feedback loops, and continuously integrate that feedback using methods we developed in open source project management.
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/feedback-loop/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/iteration/
https://stimpunks.org/fieldguide/communication/
3-5 Milestones
List 3-5 milestones your organization aims to achieve with this grant over the coming year. Please include detailed plans on how you intend to reach each milestone. For example: “By July 2025, we intend to specific milestone, and we plan to achieve this by detailed action 1 and detailed action 2, etc.
Our Objectives and Key Results are listed on our Now page.
#ableism #accessibility #adviceProcess #autisticRhizome #behaviorism #belonging #community #competencyNetwork #defaultToOpen #deficitIdeology #diversity #equity #eugenics #inclusion #nicheConstruction #omniDirectionalLearning #prosocial #restorativePractices #transformativeJustice
-
Grant Application Questions and Answers
Here are our answers to the questions on a grant we recently applied for.
Table of Contents
- History
- Root Causes
- Action & Lasting Effect
- Constituent-Led
- Community-Wide
- Organizational Structure and Decision Making
- Movement Building
- Funding and Community Support
- Community Feedback
- 3-5 Milestones
History
When did your group come together and why? Share major accomplishments and tell us about your recent activities, successes, and learning opportunities.
Stimpunks was created to forge the way for educational inclusion and to give our community the means to survive and to thrive. We as a disabled and neurodivergent run organization had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We had to create our own care systems, because “we realized that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” “Responsibility for the survival of entire communities lies with us.”
Learn more about our history, our successes, and our current activities on our front page and our Now page. We put a lot of time into long-form scrollytelling (scrolling + storytelling) and will be sharing links to our website as part of this application process. You’ve never seen a website like ours. Check it out. Professors have told us they use our website to teach digital composition.
Root Causes
What is the specific problem or injustice your group is trying to solve? What are the root causes of the problem (racism, poverty, sexism, etc.)?
We live in an age of mass behaviorism, rampant ableism, and unvarnished eugenics.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/ableism/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/behaviorism/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/eugenics/
Schools are inaccessible to us because of “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/equity/
When you or your kid is diagnosed as neurodivergent, almost all of the professional advice you get from education and healthcare is steeped in deficit ideology and the pathology paradigm.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/deficit-ideology/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/pathology-paradigm/
The logistics of disability and difference in a structurally ableist and inaccessible world poisoned by bad framing are exhausting, often impossible. We are perpetual hackers, mappers, and testers of our systems by necessity of survival.
“I would like to honour all the autistic people who survive the care system somehow.
“All those who survive extreme ‘therapy’.
“All those who are brought to their knees, reading hellish descriptions of their loved people.
“And all who did not survive this onslaught.”
—Ann Memmott
Part of surviving the onslaught is naming the systems of power.
https://stimpunks.org/pathways/systems-of-power/
Action & Lasting Effect
What is your overall strategy for solving the injustice described above? What social, economic, political, or cultural institutions or systems will you work to change in order to fight the injustice? What actions will come out of your work? What will be different in your community and our society because of your work?
IF you do direct services to meet the needs of your community, how do you connect that work to organizing, action & systems change?
IF you are creating an alternative to a current system/policy/institution, please tell us why and describe how that will make real change for your community.
We tackle injustice through two avenues, education and direct giving to individuals.
Our mutual aid grants and creator grants give money directly to individuals to use as they need.
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/direct-support-to-individuals/
We develop educational programming directed at these institutions:
- Public and private education
- Human services
- Psychiatry
- Academia and autism research
- And more.
Our emancipatory research efforts focus on the sweet spot of digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. We improve the scientific experience for the disabled and the neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.
https://stimpunks.org/research/activist/
In addition to educating those in existing systems and institutions, we have created our own anti-ableist learning spaces compatible with neurodiversity and disability. These spaces use the best of progressive pedagogy to avoid the problems that exclude us from public and private education.
Constituent-Led
Who is most impacted by the injustice you are fighting? How are those most affected actively providing leadership and direction for your work? How do you identify & develop new leaders?
Neurodivergent and disabled people are most impacted by the ableism we fight.
As part of our mission, we hire neurodivergent and disabled people and invest in their professional development. We don’t think of administrative costs as “overhead”, though we are mindful of how much we spend. We consider administrative costs a component of our mission. We pay living wages to those who help us run the organization. We include folks in our software subscriptions so that they have the tools to do work. We introduce folks to the rhythms of distributed work and team work so that they can take these skills with them wherever they go.
Community-Wide
How does your organization define diversity within your constituency? How do you ensure that everyone is represented in your organization – especially those with less privilege in your community? In addition to filling out the diversity chart, describe any activities, education, or actions your organization has taken in this area. Also explain any progress or set-backs in this area.
We outline our notions of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging as well as the major obstacles to them on this page:
https://stimpunks.org/2025/01/30/deib-and-their-adversaries/
Organizational Structure and Decision Making
Who decides what kind of work your group does? What is the decision-making process? How are you organized (staff, board, volunteers, leaders)? How are your decisionmakers accountable to the larger community? If you have a fiscal agent, please explain the relationship.
We reject hierarchy. We use prosocial principles, restorative practices, transformative justice, and an advice process. We encourage omnidirectional learning, competency networks, and a “Default to open” philosophy. We use the NeurodiVenture operating modeled.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/advice-process/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/prosocial/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/restorative-practices/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/transformative-justice/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/niche-construction/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/competency-network/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/omni-directional-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/neurodiventure/
Movement Building
How does your group see itself as part of a larger movement for social change? How does your work connect with other social change issues and communities? Describe the most important coalitions, collaborations or networks that you participate in. Include your organization’s role.
We actively participate in the greater neurodiversity and disability rights movements and are part of the ever expanding Autistic rhizome.
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/autistic-rhizome/
Our allies include:
Funding and Community Support
Please describe your current fundraising activities. How does your community support your organization? How do you plan to sustain your future work? If you have any committed or pending grants, please list them, if applicable.
We do fundraising through our website and peer-to-peer campaigns as well as events.
Our community helps with peer-to-peer fundraising.
We plan to sustain our future work by continuing peer-to-peer fundraising and applying for grants with the help of our partners at Point B(e) Strategies.
Community Feedback
How do you integrate community feedback into your work?
We default to open. We run our organization in the open in our community Discord and on our website. We iterate openly, create feedback loops, and continuously integrate that feedback using methods we developed in open source project management.
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/feedback-loop/
https://stimpunks.org/glossary/iteration/
https://stimpunks.org/fieldguide/communication/
3-5 Milestones
List 3-5 milestones your organization aims to achieve with this grant over the coming year. Please include detailed plans on how you intend to reach each milestone. For example: “By July 2025, we intend to specific milestone, and we plan to achieve this by detailed action 1 and detailed action 2, etc.
Our Objectives and Key Results are listed on our Now page.
#ableism #accessibility #adviceProcess #autisticRhizome #behaviorism #belonging #community #competencyNetwork #defaultToOpen #deficitIdeology #diversity #equity #eugenics #inclusion #nicheConstruction #omniDirectionalLearning #prosocial #restorativePractices #transformativeJustice
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The global health community has long grappled with the challenge of providing effective, scalable training to health workers, particularly in resource-constrained settings.
In recent years, digital learning platforms have emerged as a potential solution, promising to deliver accessible, engaging, and impactful training at scale.
Imagine a digital platform intended to train health workers at scale.
Their theory of change rests on a few key assumptions:
- Offering simplified, mobile-friendly courses will make training more accessible to health workers.
- Incorporating videos and case studies will keep learners engaged.
- Quizzes and knowledge checks will ensure learning happens.
- Certificates, continuing education credits, and small incentives will motivate course completion.
- Growing the user base through marketing and partnerships is the path to impact.
On the surface, this seems sensible.
Mobile optimization recognizes health workers’ technological realities.
Multimedia content seems more engaging than pure text.
Assessments appear to verify learning.
Incentives promise to drive uptake.
Scale feels synonymous with success.
While well-intentioned, such a platform risks falling into the trap of a behaviorist learning agenda.
This is an approach that, despite its prevalence, is a pedagogical dead-end with limited potential for driving meaningful, sustained improvements in health worker performance and health outcomes.
It is a paradigm that views learners as passive recipients of information, where exposure equals knowledge acquisition.
It is a model that privileges standardization over personalization, content consumption over knowledge creation, and extrinsic rewards over intrinsic motivation.
It fails to account for the rich diversity of prior experiences, contexts, and challenges that health workers bring to their learning.
Most critically, it neglects the higher-order skills – the critical thinking, the adaptive expertise, the self-directed learning capacity – that are most predictive of real-world performance.
Clicking through screens of information about neonatal care, for example, is not the same as developing the situational judgment to adapt guidelines to a complex clinical scenario, nor the reflective practice to continuously improve.
Moreover, the metrics typically prioritized by behaviorist platforms – user registrations, course completions, assessment scores – are often vanity metrics.
They create an illusion of progress while obscuring the metrics that truly matter: behavior change, performance improvement, and health outcomes.
A health worker may complete a generic course on neonatal care, for example, but this does not necessarily translate into the situational judgment to adapt guidelines to complex clinical scenarios, nor the reflective practice to continuously improve.
The behaviorist paradigm’s emphasis on information transmission and standardized content may stem from an implicit assumption that health workers at the community level do not require higher-order critical thinking skills – that they simply need a predetermined set of knowledge and procedures.
This view is not only paternalistic and insulting, but it is also fundamentally misguided.
A robust body of scientific evidence on learning culture and performance demonstrates that the most effective organizations are those that foster continuous learning, critical reflection, and adaptive problem-solving at all levels.
Health workers at the frontlines face complex, unpredictable challenges that demand situational judgment, creative thinking, and the ability to learn from experience.
Failing to cultivate these capacities not only underestimates the potential of these health workers, but it also constrains the performance and resilience of health systems as a whole.
Even if such a platform achieves its growth targets, it is unlikely to realize its impact goals.
Health workers may dutifully click through courses, but genuine transformative learning remains elusive.
The alternative lies in a learning agenda grounded in advances of the last three decades learning science.
These advances remain largely unknown or ignored in global health.
This approach positions health workers as active, knowledgeable agents, rich in experience and expertise.
It designs learning experiences not merely to transmit information, but to foster critical reflection, dialogue, and problem-solving.
It replaces generic content with authentic, context-specific challenges, and isolated study with collaborative sense-making in peer networks.
It recognizes intrinsic motivation – the desire to grow, to serve, to make a difference – as the most potent driver of learning.
Here, success is measured not in superficial metrics, but in meaningful outcomes: capacity to lead change in facilities and communities that leads to tangible improvements in the quality of care.
Global health leaders faces a choice: to settle for the illusion of progress, or to invest in the deep, difficult work of authentic learning and systemic change, commensurate with the complexity and urgency of the task at hand.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
https://redasadki.me/2024/06/30/learn-health-but-beware-of-the-behaviorist-trap/
#behaviorism #eLearning #healthTraining #HealthLearn #HRH #HumanResourcesForHealth #learningCulture #learningStrategy #workforceDevelopment
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#SusanGreenfield - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZkPldjI6Uo
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMind #Science #Physics #Mind #Neuroscience #Brain #Qualia #SecretSauce #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #Reductionism #Emergence #Panpsychism #Soul #HardProblem #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #Assembly #NeuralAssembly #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#SusanGreenfield - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZkPldjI6Uo
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMind #Science #Physics #Mind #Neuroscience #Brain #Qualia #SecretSauce #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #Reductionism #Emergence #Panpsychism #Soul #HardProblem #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #Assembly #NeuralAssembly #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#SusanGreenfield - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZkPldjI6Uo
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMind #Science #Physics #Mind #Neuroscience #Brain #Qualia #SecretSauce #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #Reductionism #Emergence #Panpsychism #Soul #HardProblem #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #Assembly #NeuralAssembly #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#SusanGreenfield - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZkPldjI6Uo
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMind #Science #Physics #Mind #Neuroscience #Brain #Qualia #SecretSauce #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #Reductionism #Emergence #Panpsychism #Soul #HardProblem #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #Assembly #NeuralAssembly #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#SusanGreenfield - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZkPldjI6Uo
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMind #Science #Physics #Mind #Neuroscience #Brain #Qualia #SecretSauce #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #Reductionism #Emergence #Panpsychism #Soul #HardProblem #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #Assembly #NeuralAssembly #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NicholasHumphrey - The #MindBodyProblem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIxOF792k5E&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Mind #Consciousness #MindBody #HardProblem #Zombie #Behaviour #Behavior #Behaviourism #Behaviorism #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NicholasHumphrey - The #MindBodyProblem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIxOF792k5E&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Mind #Consciousness #MindBody #HardProblem #Zombie #Behaviour #Behavior #Behaviourism #Behaviorism #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NicholasHumphrey - The #MindBodyProblem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIxOF792k5E&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Mind #Consciousness #MindBody #HardProblem #Zombie #Behaviour #Behavior #Behaviourism #Behaviorism #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NicholasHumphrey - The #MindBodyProblem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIxOF792k5E&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Mind #Consciousness #MindBody #HardProblem #Zombie #Behaviour #Behavior #Behaviourism #Behaviorism #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NicholasHumphrey - The #MindBodyProblem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIxOF792k5E&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Mind #Consciousness #MindBody #HardProblem #Zombie #Behaviour #Behavior #Behaviourism #Behaviorism #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NedBlock - Can #Consciousness be #NonBiological?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6J7n8utnNw&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Qualia #SelfAwareness #Neuroscience #Neurophysiology #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #ExplanatoryGap #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NedBlock - Can #Consciousness be #NonBiological?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6J7n8utnNw&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Qualia #SelfAwareness #Neuroscience #Neurophysiology #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #ExplanatoryGap #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NedBlock - Can #Consciousness be #NonBiological?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6J7n8utnNw&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Qualia #SelfAwareness #Neuroscience #Neurophysiology #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #ExplanatoryGap #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NedBlock - Can #Consciousness be #NonBiological?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6J7n8utnNw&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Qualia #SelfAwareness #Neuroscience #Neurophysiology #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #ExplanatoryGap #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#NedBlock - Can #Consciousness be #NonBiological?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6J7n8utnNw&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Qualia #SelfAwareness #Neuroscience #Neurophysiology #Dualism #Physicalism #Materialism #ExplanatoryGap #Behaviorism #Behaviourism #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Coming soon via this #mastodon account.
The definitive guide to the #psychology that is causing the #ClimateCrisis
Spoiler alert! The guide will be a how to feel good by doing good environmental behaviors & activities. And how to even feel good about yourself (an intrinsic good), that other people are evidently wanting to do environmentally harmful behaviors and activities.
The psychology of #behaviorism & a wannabe #greenwashed
#business #consumerism society -
I did not direct my life.
I didn’t design it.
I never made decisions.
Things always came up
and made them FOR me.
That’s what life is.
#Reinforcement
#operant #conditioning
#radical #behaviorism
#behavior #analysis
#verbal behavior
#BFSkinner 🥳
#fredricwertham 🥳
#fredrogers 🥳
#Ovid 🥳
#Ibsen 🥳
#BalthasarBekker 🥳
#TorbernBergman 🥳
