#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
###
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 -
“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
###
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 #culture #FranzBoas #history #identity #KennethSpence #learning #LucienLévyBruhl #person #personhood #Psychology #Science -
“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
###
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 -
“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
###
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 -
“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
###
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 #culture #FranzBoas #history #identity #KennethSpence #learning #LucienLévyBruhl #person #personhood #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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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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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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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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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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Michael Lewis:
"American people elected the president who expressed the feeling of anger they were feeling (at the financial crisis)"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9UliCVsDcw
#trump #maga #behaviorism #psychology -
Michael Lewis:
"American people elected the president who expressed the feeling of anger they were feeling (at the financial crisis)"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9UliCVsDcw
#trump #maga #behaviorism #psychology -
Michael Lewis:
"American people elected the president who expressed the feeling of anger they were feeling (at the financial crisis)"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9UliCVsDcw
#trump #maga #behaviorism #psychology -
Michael Lewis:
"American people elected the president who expressed the feeling of anger they were feeling (at the financial crisis)"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9UliCVsDcw
#trump #maga #behaviorism #psychology -
Michael Lewis:
"American people elected the president who expressed the feeling of anger they were feeling (at the financial crisis)"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9UliCVsDcw
#trump #maga #behaviorism #psychology -
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent to the “Science of Learning”: You’ll Never See Us Through Your Complexity Controls
Neurodivergent people are treated as noise to be filtered out in most studies supporting the “science of learning”.
The thing is, research like this — serious scientific research into Autism — has historically treated the subjective experiences of its subjects as noise to be filtered out. They all think they can accurately read our emotions if they need to and so don’t need to ask us.
We are discounted as outliers.
The varied and dynamic nature of learning environments – too many variables to isolate one out, the way norm-referencing is leveraged to discount outliers, and the lack of applicable research on neurodiverse students – necessitates a more flexible and holistic approach.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Our needs and ways of being are deemed too inconvenient to consider.
Which is why the Disability Industry, the SpEd/SEN leadership, and so many groups of frustrated middle-class parents do not, and may not ever understand people with disabilities. Those groups want us to be like them, or want to sell parents and schools “cures” that will make us be like them. They want me to read the way they do, and to read as fast and as “accurately” (which refers to grabbing plot points, nothing else) as they do. They want me to sit still and focus “on the task at hand” the way they do. They want me to move as they do. Think the way they do. Speak the way they do. Understand the world the way they do. All, of course, in pursuit of capitalist conformity and efficiency. (see Stimpunks for the best deep dives into these issues.)
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent. | by Ira David Socol | May, 2025 | Medium
Kids who are different are told every day, every hour, often every minute, by the most well-meaning people, that they are “born wrong” and require repair. And yes, accommodating our differences is inconvenient, it does create costs and work for those with power, but human diversity and neurodiversity, just like every kind of diversity, strengthens every ecosystem.
And believing that, and acting as if you believe it, is the only humane path.
So, the vast majority of studies just ignore us.
This review, which includes 90 studies conducted in 21 countries, reveals that the majority (92%) did not consider neurodiversity as a potential factor influencing cognitive load in online learning.
Our findings reveal a major research gap, as most studies overlook the distinct neurocognitive profiles of neurodivergent students. Notably, ADHD and ASD learners may exhibit unique cognitive load responses, suggesting that established cognitive load theories and instructional design guidelines might not uniformly be applicable in neurodiverse classrooms. Lastly, inconsistent methodologies in measuring cognitive load in online learning point to the need for more uniform research approaches. Future research should prioritise creating adaptive, inclusive online learning environments that respect and accommodate cognitive differences, which will not only benefit neurodivergent students but also enhance the online learning experience for all students.
It is past time to consider neurodiversity. Neuroscience without neurodiversity is often misguided and harmful.
The multimedia principle is the idea from multimedia theory that providing both words (usually spoken) accompanied by images supports learning by maximizing working memory. I’m not an expert by any means on this area of research, but It is quite interesting to think that widely accepted evidence-based principles on instructional design/learning like multimedia theory have not been confirmed for very common disability experiences such as dyslexia.
Overall, it really does seem that we are just beginning to consider and test basic “science of learning” principles with attention to neurodiversity. Indeed, as these authors note, “Research on multimedia learning typically assumes that learning outcomes are the result of the design of materials; however, an equally important but less studied consideration is the role individual differences play.”
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with phrases like “how learning works,” when it is probably more accurate to say “how learning works for many people”
The complexity control of behaviorism and the science of learning has utterly failed us.
Our students are not surgically modified dogs nor are they pigeons in operant conditioning chambers attempting to learn nonsense words. No child enters a classroom devoid of emotion, interest, or prior knowledge. Owing to the key distinctions between the controlled laboratory and the living classroom, there simply may be no connection between what is taught and what is learned; or between the educational intervention and the desired outcome. This is why, in pedagogies centered on instruction drawn from the narrow view of “The Science of Learning,” behaviorism is a complexity control meant to reduce the number of possible variables between instruction and assessment; to better reproduce the uncomplicated relationship between variables in the Skinner Box. We know from listening to students themselves that there has been a persistent crisis in schools, even before COVID: students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school, engagement plummets alongside mental health, and absenteeism surges. Ultimately, any science of learning matters far less than its implementation. Maintaining fidelity to what happened in, say, Pavlov’s lab matters significantly less if the practices derived from his work contribute to stress, anxiety, and alienation in students.
If the perfect education system requires that you dehumanize the people in it — adults and kids alike — that’s not a system that “works” by most metrics worth caring about. The kids in our schools have to be viewed as more than behaviorist subjects to be acted upon. If we at least admit that much, then the business of teaching gets far more complicated. Suddenly there are a number of other factors we must tend to that matter a great deal. I’ll quote again from apparent “pseudoscientist” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” These are self-evident truths that we are finally beginning to explore the neurobiological basis for in ways that shatter many previous models of the brain that still hold cultural sway.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Building Frankenstein children from reductionist, complexity-controlled parts is morally wrong and utterly wrong-headed. We must foreground complexity as the baseline for the sciences of learning to have any real meaning when applied to the rich complexity and diversity of human actuality.
Stimpunks do a great job reinforcing this through a Neurodiversity lens and are some of the few ND advocates on here who have wonderful language to capture the needed complexities for understanding each human, rather than categorizing humans into buckets.
Further Reading
https://stimpunks.org/2025/05/23/professor-guy-claxton-on-the-science-of-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/11/22/on-the-problems-with-science-of-reading/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/were-raising-whole-children-not-frankenstein-children/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/12/10/a-neurobiological-basis-for-progressive-education/
-
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent to the “Science of Learning”: You’ll Never See Us Through Your Complexity Controls
Neurodivergent people are treated as noise to be filtered out in most studies supporting the “science of learning”.
The thing is, research like this — serious scientific research into Autism — has historically treated the subjective experiences of its subjects as noise to be filtered out. They all think they can accurately read our emotions if they need to and so don’t need to ask us.
We are discounted as outliers.
The varied and dynamic nature of learning environments – too many variables to isolate one out, the way norm-referencing is leveraged to discount outliers, and the lack of applicable research on neurodiverse students – necessitates a more flexible and holistic approach.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Our needs and ways of being are deemed too inconvenient to consider.
Which is why the Disability Industry, the SpEd/SEN leadership, and so many groups of frustrated middle-class parents do not, and may not ever understand people with disabilities. Those groups want us to be like them, or want to sell parents and schools “cures” that will make us be like them. They want me to read the way they do, and to read as fast and as “accurately” (which refers to grabbing plot points, nothing else) as they do. They want me to sit still and focus “on the task at hand” the way they do. They want me to move as they do. Think the way they do. Speak the way they do. Understand the world the way they do. All, of course, in pursuit of capitalist conformity and efficiency. (see Stimpunks for the best deep dives into these issues.)
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent. | by Ira David Socol | May, 2025 | Medium
Kids who are different are told every day, every hour, often every minute, by the most well-meaning people, that they are “born wrong” and require repair. And yes, accommodating our differences is inconvenient, it does create costs and work for those with power, but human diversity and neurodiversity, just like every kind of diversity, strengthens every ecosystem.
And believing that, and acting as if you believe it, is the only humane path.
So, the vast majority of studies just ignore us.
This review, which includes 90 studies conducted in 21 countries, reveals that the majority (92%) did not consider neurodiversity as a potential factor influencing cognitive load in online learning.
Our findings reveal a major research gap, as most studies overlook the distinct neurocognitive profiles of neurodivergent students. Notably, ADHD and ASD learners may exhibit unique cognitive load responses, suggesting that established cognitive load theories and instructional design guidelines might not uniformly be applicable in neurodiverse classrooms. Lastly, inconsistent methodologies in measuring cognitive load in online learning point to the need for more uniform research approaches. Future research should prioritise creating adaptive, inclusive online learning environments that respect and accommodate cognitive differences, which will not only benefit neurodivergent students but also enhance the online learning experience for all students.
It is past time to consider neurodiversity. Neuroscience without neurodiversity is often misguided and harmful.
The multimedia principle is the idea from multimedia theory that providing both words (usually spoken) accompanied by images supports learning by maximizing working memory. I’m not an expert by any means on this area of research, but It is quite interesting to think that widely accepted evidence-based principles on instructional design/learning like multimedia theory have not been confirmed for very common disability experiences such as dyslexia.
Overall, it really does seem that we are just beginning to consider and test basic “science of learning” principles with attention to neurodiversity. Indeed, as these authors note, “Research on multimedia learning typically assumes that learning outcomes are the result of the design of materials; however, an equally important but less studied consideration is the role individual differences play.”
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with phrases like “how learning works,” when it is probably more accurate to say “how learning works for many people”
The complexity control of behaviorism and the science of learning has utterly failed us.
Our students are not surgically modified dogs nor are they pigeons in operant conditioning chambers attempting to learn nonsense words. No child enters a classroom devoid of emotion, interest, or prior knowledge. Owing to the key distinctions between the controlled laboratory and the living classroom, there simply may be no connection between what is taught and what is learned; or between the educational intervention and the desired outcome. This is why, in pedagogies centered on instruction drawn from the narrow view of “The Science of Learning,” behaviorism is a complexity control meant to reduce the number of possible variables between instruction and assessment; to better reproduce the uncomplicated relationship between variables in the Skinner Box. We know from listening to students themselves that there has been a persistent crisis in schools, even before COVID: students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school, engagement plummets alongside mental health, and absenteeism surges. Ultimately, any science of learning matters far less than its implementation. Maintaining fidelity to what happened in, say, Pavlov’s lab matters significantly less if the practices derived from his work contribute to stress, anxiety, and alienation in students.
If the perfect education system requires that you dehumanize the people in it — adults and kids alike — that’s not a system that “works” by most metrics worth caring about. The kids in our schools have to be viewed as more than behaviorist subjects to be acted upon. If we at least admit that much, then the business of teaching gets far more complicated. Suddenly there are a number of other factors we must tend to that matter a great deal. I’ll quote again from apparent “pseudoscientist” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” These are self-evident truths that we are finally beginning to explore the neurobiological basis for in ways that shatter many previous models of the brain that still hold cultural sway.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Building Frankenstein children from reductionist, complexity-controlled parts is morally wrong and utterly wrong-headed. We must foreground complexity as the baseline for the sciences of learning to have any real meaning when applied to the rich complexity and diversity of human actuality.
Stimpunks do a great job reinforcing this through a Neurodiversity lens and are some of the few ND advocates on here who have wonderful language to capture the needed complexities for understanding each human, rather than categorizing humans into buckets.
Further Reading
https://stimpunks.org/2025/05/23/professor-guy-claxton-on-the-science-of-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/11/22/on-the-problems-with-science-of-reading/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/were-raising-whole-children-not-frankenstein-children/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/12/10/a-neurobiological-basis-for-progressive-education/
-
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent to the “Science of Learning”: You’ll Never See Us Through Your Complexity Controls
Neurodivergent people are treated as noise to be filtered out in most studies supporting the “science of learning”.
The thing is, research like this — serious scientific research into Autism — has historically treated the subjective experiences of its subjects as noise to be filtered out. They all think they can accurately read our emotions if they need to and so don’t need to ask us.
We are discounted as outliers.
The varied and dynamic nature of learning environments – too many variables to isolate one out, the way norm-referencing is leveraged to discount outliers, and the lack of applicable research on neurodiverse students – necessitates a more flexible and holistic approach.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Our needs and ways of being are deemed too inconvenient to consider.
Which is why the Disability Industry, the SpEd/SEN leadership, and so many groups of frustrated middle-class parents do not, and may not ever understand people with disabilities. Those groups want us to be like them, or want to sell parents and schools “cures” that will make us be like them. They want me to read the way they do, and to read as fast and as “accurately” (which refers to grabbing plot points, nothing else) as they do. They want me to sit still and focus “on the task at hand” the way they do. They want me to move as they do. Think the way they do. Speak the way they do. Understand the world the way they do. All, of course, in pursuit of capitalist conformity and efficiency. (see Stimpunks for the best deep dives into these issues.)
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent. | by Ira David Socol | May, 2025 | Medium
Kids who are different are told every day, every hour, often every minute, by the most well-meaning people, that they are “born wrong” and require repair. And yes, accommodating our differences is inconvenient, it does create costs and work for those with power, but human diversity and neurodiversity, just like every kind of diversity, strengthens every ecosystem.
And believing that, and acting as if you believe it, is the only humane path.
So, the vast majority of studies just ignore us.
This review, which includes 90 studies conducted in 21 countries, reveals that the majority (92%) did not consider neurodiversity as a potential factor influencing cognitive load in online learning.
Our findings reveal a major research gap, as most studies overlook the distinct neurocognitive profiles of neurodivergent students. Notably, ADHD and ASD learners may exhibit unique cognitive load responses, suggesting that established cognitive load theories and instructional design guidelines might not uniformly be applicable in neurodiverse classrooms. Lastly, inconsistent methodologies in measuring cognitive load in online learning point to the need for more uniform research approaches. Future research should prioritise creating adaptive, inclusive online learning environments that respect and accommodate cognitive differences, which will not only benefit neurodivergent students but also enhance the online learning experience for all students.
It is past time to consider neurodiversity. Neuroscience without neurodiversity is often misguided and harmful.
The multimedia principle is the idea from multimedia theory that providing both words (usually spoken) accompanied by images supports learning by maximizing working memory. I’m not an expert by any means on this area of research, but It is quite interesting to think that widely accepted evidence-based principles on instructional design/learning like multimedia theory have not been confirmed for very common disability experiences such as dyslexia.
Overall, it really does seem that we are just beginning to consider and test basic “science of learning” principles with attention to neurodiversity. Indeed, as these authors note, “Research on multimedia learning typically assumes that learning outcomes are the result of the design of materials; however, an equally important but less studied consideration is the role individual differences play.”
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with phrases like “how learning works,” when it is probably more accurate to say “how learning works for many people”
The complexity control of behaviorism and the science of learning has utterly failed us.
Our students are not surgically modified dogs nor are they pigeons in operant conditioning chambers attempting to learn nonsense words. No child enters a classroom devoid of emotion, interest, or prior knowledge. Owing to the key distinctions between the controlled laboratory and the living classroom, there simply may be no connection between what is taught and what is learned; or between the educational intervention and the desired outcome. This is why, in pedagogies centered on instruction drawn from the narrow view of “The Science of Learning,” behaviorism is a complexity control meant to reduce the number of possible variables between instruction and assessment; to better reproduce the uncomplicated relationship between variables in the Skinner Box. We know from listening to students themselves that there has been a persistent crisis in schools, even before COVID: students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school, engagement plummets alongside mental health, and absenteeism surges. Ultimately, any science of learning matters far less than its implementation. Maintaining fidelity to what happened in, say, Pavlov’s lab matters significantly less if the practices derived from his work contribute to stress, anxiety, and alienation in students.
If the perfect education system requires that you dehumanize the people in it — adults and kids alike — that’s not a system that “works” by most metrics worth caring about. The kids in our schools have to be viewed as more than behaviorist subjects to be acted upon. If we at least admit that much, then the business of teaching gets far more complicated. Suddenly there are a number of other factors we must tend to that matter a great deal. I’ll quote again from apparent “pseudoscientist” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” These are self-evident truths that we are finally beginning to explore the neurobiological basis for in ways that shatter many previous models of the brain that still hold cultural sway.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Building Frankenstein children from reductionist, complexity-controlled parts is morally wrong and utterly wrong-headed. We must foreground complexity as the baseline for the sciences of learning to have any real meaning when applied to the rich complexity and diversity of human actuality.
Stimpunks do a great job reinforcing this through a Neurodiversity lens and are some of the few ND advocates on here who have wonderful language to capture the needed complexities for understanding each human, rather than categorizing humans into buckets.
Further Reading
https://stimpunks.org/2025/05/23/professor-guy-claxton-on-the-science-of-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/11/22/on-the-problems-with-science-of-reading/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/were-raising-whole-children-not-frankenstein-children/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/12/10/a-neurobiological-basis-for-progressive-education/
-
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent to the “Science of Learning”: You’ll Never See Us Through Your Complexity Controls
Neurodivergent people are treated as noise to be filtered out in most studies supporting the “science of learning”.
The thing is, research like this — serious scientific research into Autism — has historically treated the subjective experiences of its subjects as noise to be filtered out. They all think they can accurately read our emotions if they need to and so don’t need to ask us.
We are discounted as outliers.
The varied and dynamic nature of learning environments – too many variables to isolate one out, the way norm-referencing is leveraged to discount outliers, and the lack of applicable research on neurodiverse students – necessitates a more flexible and holistic approach.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Our needs and ways of being are deemed too inconvenient to consider.
Which is why the Disability Industry, the SpEd/SEN leadership, and so many groups of frustrated middle-class parents do not, and may not ever understand people with disabilities. Those groups want us to be like them, or want to sell parents and schools “cures” that will make us be like them. They want me to read the way they do, and to read as fast and as “accurately” (which refers to grabbing plot points, nothing else) as they do. They want me to sit still and focus “on the task at hand” the way they do. They want me to move as they do. Think the way they do. Speak the way they do. Understand the world the way they do. All, of course, in pursuit of capitalist conformity and efficiency. (see Stimpunks for the best deep dives into these issues.)
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent. | by Ira David Socol | May, 2025 | Medium
Kids who are different are told every day, every hour, often every minute, by the most well-meaning people, that they are “born wrong” and require repair. And yes, accommodating our differences is inconvenient, it does create costs and work for those with power, but human diversity and neurodiversity, just like every kind of diversity, strengthens every ecosystem.
And believing that, and acting as if you believe it, is the only humane path.
So, the vast majority of studies just ignore us.
This review, which includes 90 studies conducted in 21 countries, reveals that the majority (92%) did not consider neurodiversity as a potential factor influencing cognitive load in online learning.
Our findings reveal a major research gap, as most studies overlook the distinct neurocognitive profiles of neurodivergent students. Notably, ADHD and ASD learners may exhibit unique cognitive load responses, suggesting that established cognitive load theories and instructional design guidelines might not uniformly be applicable in neurodiverse classrooms. Lastly, inconsistent methodologies in measuring cognitive load in online learning point to the need for more uniform research approaches. Future research should prioritise creating adaptive, inclusive online learning environments that respect and accommodate cognitive differences, which will not only benefit neurodivergent students but also enhance the online learning experience for all students.
It is past time to consider neurodiversity. Neuroscience without neurodiversity is often misguided and harmful.
The multimedia principle is the idea from multimedia theory that providing both words (usually spoken) accompanied by images supports learning by maximizing working memory. I’m not an expert by any means on this area of research, but It is quite interesting to think that widely accepted evidence-based principles on instructional design/learning like multimedia theory have not been confirmed for very common disability experiences such as dyslexia.
Overall, it really does seem that we are just beginning to consider and test basic “science of learning” principles with attention to neurodiversity. Indeed, as these authors note, “Research on multimedia learning typically assumes that learning outcomes are the result of the design of materials; however, an equally important but less studied consideration is the role individual differences play.”
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with phrases like “how learning works,” when it is probably more accurate to say “how learning works for many people”
The complexity control of behaviorism and the science of learning has utterly failed us.
Our students are not surgically modified dogs nor are they pigeons in operant conditioning chambers attempting to learn nonsense words. No child enters a classroom devoid of emotion, interest, or prior knowledge. Owing to the key distinctions between the controlled laboratory and the living classroom, there simply may be no connection between what is taught and what is learned; or between the educational intervention and the desired outcome. This is why, in pedagogies centered on instruction drawn from the narrow view of “The Science of Learning,” behaviorism is a complexity control meant to reduce the number of possible variables between instruction and assessment; to better reproduce the uncomplicated relationship between variables in the Skinner Box. We know from listening to students themselves that there has been a persistent crisis in schools, even before COVID: students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school, engagement plummets alongside mental health, and absenteeism surges. Ultimately, any science of learning matters far less than its implementation. Maintaining fidelity to what happened in, say, Pavlov’s lab matters significantly less if the practices derived from his work contribute to stress, anxiety, and alienation in students.
If the perfect education system requires that you dehumanize the people in it — adults and kids alike — that’s not a system that “works” by most metrics worth caring about. The kids in our schools have to be viewed as more than behaviorist subjects to be acted upon. If we at least admit that much, then the business of teaching gets far more complicated. Suddenly there are a number of other factors we must tend to that matter a great deal. I’ll quote again from apparent “pseudoscientist” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” These are self-evident truths that we are finally beginning to explore the neurobiological basis for in ways that shatter many previous models of the brain that still hold cultural sway.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Building Frankenstein children from reductionist, complexity-controlled parts is morally wrong and utterly wrong-headed. We must foreground complexity as the baseline for the sciences of learning to have any real meaning when applied to the rich complexity and diversity of human actuality.
Stimpunks do a great job reinforcing this through a Neurodiversity lens and are some of the few ND advocates on here who have wonderful language to capture the needed complexities for understanding each human, rather than categorizing humans into buckets.
Further Reading
https://stimpunks.org/2025/05/23/professor-guy-claxton-on-the-science-of-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/11/22/on-the-problems-with-science-of-reading/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/were-raising-whole-children-not-frankenstein-children/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/12/10/a-neurobiological-basis-for-progressive-education/
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The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent to the “Science of Learning”: You’ll Never See Us Through Your Complexity Controls
Neurodivergent people are treated as noise to be filtered out in most studies supporting the “science of learning”.
The thing is, research like this — serious scientific research into Autism — has historically treated the subjective experiences of its subjects as noise to be filtered out. They all think they can accurately read our emotions if they need to and so don’t need to ask us.
We are discounted as outliers.
The varied and dynamic nature of learning environments – too many variables to isolate one out, the way norm-referencing is leveraged to discount outliers, and the lack of applicable research on neurodiverse students – necessitates a more flexible and holistic approach.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Our needs and ways of being are deemed too inconvenient to consider.
Which is why the Disability Industry, the SpEd/SEN leadership, and so many groups of frustrated middle-class parents do not, and may not ever understand people with disabilities. Those groups want us to be like them, or want to sell parents and schools “cures” that will make us be like them. They want me to read the way they do, and to read as fast and as “accurately” (which refers to grabbing plot points, nothing else) as they do. They want me to sit still and focus “on the task at hand” the way they do. They want me to move as they do. Think the way they do. Speak the way they do. Understand the world the way they do. All, of course, in pursuit of capitalist conformity and efficiency. (see Stimpunks for the best deep dives into these issues.)
The Incredible Inconvenience of the Neurodivergent. | by Ira David Socol | May, 2025 | Medium
Kids who are different are told every day, every hour, often every minute, by the most well-meaning people, that they are “born wrong” and require repair. And yes, accommodating our differences is inconvenient, it does create costs and work for those with power, but human diversity and neurodiversity, just like every kind of diversity, strengthens every ecosystem.
And believing that, and acting as if you believe it, is the only humane path.
So, the vast majority of studies just ignore us.
This review, which includes 90 studies conducted in 21 countries, reveals that the majority (92%) did not consider neurodiversity as a potential factor influencing cognitive load in online learning.
Our findings reveal a major research gap, as most studies overlook the distinct neurocognitive profiles of neurodivergent students. Notably, ADHD and ASD learners may exhibit unique cognitive load responses, suggesting that established cognitive load theories and instructional design guidelines might not uniformly be applicable in neurodiverse classrooms. Lastly, inconsistent methodologies in measuring cognitive load in online learning point to the need for more uniform research approaches. Future research should prioritise creating adaptive, inclusive online learning environments that respect and accommodate cognitive differences, which will not only benefit neurodivergent students but also enhance the online learning experience for all students.
It is past time to consider neurodiversity. Neuroscience without neurodiversity is often misguided and harmful.
The multimedia principle is the idea from multimedia theory that providing both words (usually spoken) accompanied by images supports learning by maximizing working memory. I’m not an expert by any means on this area of research, but It is quite interesting to think that widely accepted evidence-based principles on instructional design/learning like multimedia theory have not been confirmed for very common disability experiences such as dyslexia.
Overall, it really does seem that we are just beginning to consider and test basic “science of learning” principles with attention to neurodiversity. Indeed, as these authors note, “Research on multimedia learning typically assumes that learning outcomes are the result of the design of materials; however, an equally important but less studied consideration is the role individual differences play.”
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with phrases like “how learning works,” when it is probably more accurate to say “how learning works for many people”
The complexity control of behaviorism and the science of learning has utterly failed us.
Our students are not surgically modified dogs nor are they pigeons in operant conditioning chambers attempting to learn nonsense words. No child enters a classroom devoid of emotion, interest, or prior knowledge. Owing to the key distinctions between the controlled laboratory and the living classroom, there simply may be no connection between what is taught and what is learned; or between the educational intervention and the desired outcome. This is why, in pedagogies centered on instruction drawn from the narrow view of “The Science of Learning,” behaviorism is a complexity control meant to reduce the number of possible variables between instruction and assessment; to better reproduce the uncomplicated relationship between variables in the Skinner Box. We know from listening to students themselves that there has been a persistent crisis in schools, even before COVID: students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school, engagement plummets alongside mental health, and absenteeism surges. Ultimately, any science of learning matters far less than its implementation. Maintaining fidelity to what happened in, say, Pavlov’s lab matters significantly less if the practices derived from his work contribute to stress, anxiety, and alienation in students.
If the perfect education system requires that you dehumanize the people in it — adults and kids alike — that’s not a system that “works” by most metrics worth caring about. The kids in our schools have to be viewed as more than behaviorist subjects to be acted upon. If we at least admit that much, then the business of teaching gets far more complicated. Suddenly there are a number of other factors we must tend to that matter a great deal. I’ll quote again from apparent “pseudoscientist” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” These are self-evident truths that we are finally beginning to explore the neurobiological basis for in ways that shatter many previous models of the brain that still hold cultural sway.
Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Building Frankenstein children from reductionist, complexity-controlled parts is morally wrong and utterly wrong-headed. We must foreground complexity as the baseline for the sciences of learning to have any real meaning when applied to the rich complexity and diversity of human actuality.
Stimpunks do a great job reinforcing this through a Neurodiversity lens and are some of the few ND advocates on here who have wonderful language to capture the needed complexities for understanding each human, rather than categorizing humans into buckets.
Further Reading
https://stimpunks.org/2025/05/23/professor-guy-claxton-on-the-science-of-learning/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/11/22/on-the-problems-with-science-of-reading/
https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/were-raising-whole-children-not-frankenstein-children/
https://stimpunks.org/2023/12/10/a-neurobiological-basis-for-progressive-education/
-
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
-
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
-
Why #psychology hasn’t had a big new idea in decades - it doesn’t yet have a paradigm. “Despite some honest attempts, psychology has never had a paradigm, only proto-paradigms. We’re still more like alchemy than chemistry. And we won’t be like chemistry until we have our first paradigm.” TL;dr - This essay is a very deep dive into what it will take to make psychology a ‘real’ science; how that might happen, and the emerging models that might, just might, drive psychology to evolve. The author, a psychologist himself, uses the alchemy-to-chemistry transition as an example and suggests that as psychology evolves, it may just split into several different disciplines. This is a very long read. #MentalHealth #science #behavior #behaviorism #CognitivePsychology #essay
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-psychology-hasnt-had-a-big-new -
Why #psychology hasn’t had a big new idea in decades - it doesn’t yet have a paradigm. “Despite some honest attempts, psychology has never had a paradigm, only proto-paradigms. We’re still more like alchemy than chemistry. And we won’t be like chemistry until we have our first paradigm.” TL;dr - This essay is a very deep dive into what it will take to make psychology a ‘real’ science; how that might happen, and the emerging models that might, just might, drive psychology to evolve. The author, a psychologist himself, uses the alchemy-to-chemistry transition as an example and suggests that as psychology evolves, it may just split into several different disciplines. This is a very long read. #MentalHealth #science #behavior #behaviorism #CognitivePsychology #essay
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-psychology-hasnt-had-a-big-new -
Why #psychology hasn’t had a big new idea in decades - it doesn’t yet have a paradigm. “Despite some honest attempts, psychology has never had a paradigm, only proto-paradigms. We’re still more like alchemy than chemistry. And we won’t be like chemistry until we have our first paradigm.” TL;dr - This essay is a very deep dive into what it will take to make psychology a ‘real’ science; how that might happen, and the emerging models that might, just might, drive psychology to evolve. The author, a psychologist himself, uses the alchemy-to-chemistry transition as an example and suggests that as psychology evolves, it may just split into several different disciplines. This is a very long read. #MentalHealth #science #behavior #behaviorism #CognitivePsychology #essay
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-psychology-hasnt-had-a-big-new -
Why #psychology hasn’t had a big new idea in decades - it doesn’t yet have a paradigm. “Despite some honest attempts, psychology has never had a paradigm, only proto-paradigms. We’re still more like alchemy than chemistry. And we won’t be like chemistry until we have our first paradigm.” TL;dr - This essay is a very deep dive into what it will take to make psychology a ‘real’ science; how that might happen, and the emerging models that might, just might, drive psychology to evolve. The author, a psychologist himself, uses the alchemy-to-chemistry transition as an example and suggests that as psychology evolves, it may just split into several different disciplines. This is a very long read. #MentalHealth #science #behavior #behaviorism #CognitivePsychology #essay
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-psychology-hasnt-had-a-big-new -
Why #psychology hasn’t had a big new idea in decades - it doesn’t yet have a paradigm. “Despite some honest attempts, psychology has never had a paradigm, only proto-paradigms. We’re still more like alchemy than chemistry. And we won’t be like chemistry until we have our first paradigm.” TL;dr - This essay is a very deep dive into what it will take to make psychology a ‘real’ science; how that might happen, and the emerging models that might, just might, drive psychology to evolve. The author, a psychologist himself, uses the alchemy-to-chemistry transition as an example and suggests that as psychology evolves, it may just split into several different disciplines. This is a very long read. #MentalHealth #science #behavior #behaviorism #CognitivePsychology #essay
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-psychology-hasnt-had-a-big-new -
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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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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DEI-AB and Their Adversaries
What are diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging? What are their narrative adversaries? We provide a glossary of terms below. Follow the links for deeply sourced reference materials.
DEI-AB
diversity = a range of differences; variety
equity = the process of redistributing access and opportunity to be fair and just; the state of being free of bias, discrimination, and identity-predictable outcomes and experiences
inclusion = the act of extending fellowship, membership, association, and connection—agnostic of rank, status, gender, race, appearance, intelligence, education, beliefs, values, politics, habits, traditions, language, customs, history, or any other defining characteristic
accessibility = accessibility means that people with disabilities can attend and fully participate in a given opportunity
belonging = the extent to which we feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others; the experience of being at home in ourselves as well as the social, environmental, organizational, and cultural contexts of our lives
Their Adversaries
meritocracy myth = a widely held but false assertion that individual merit is always rewarded; the myth of meritocracy is one of the longest lasting and most dangerous falsehoods in American life
lowering the bar = a racist, sexist, and ableist narrative with no basis in reality that represents diversifying hiring pipelines, attracting candidates from underrepresented groups, and supporting them in the workplace as “lowering the bar” by hiring less-qualified individuals
politics of resentment = manipulations of status anxiety; organization of interest groups based on perceived deprivation or the threat of deprivation
sameness-based fairness = notion of fairness where everyone gets the same thing rather than each getting what they need
fundamental attribution error = to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour
conquering gaze from nowhere= the interpretation of objectivity as neutral and not allowing for participation or stances; an uninvolved, uninvested approach that claims objectivity to “represent while escaping representation”
scientism = the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge
epistemic injustice = where our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity
behaviorism = a dehumanizing mechanism of learning that reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs
ableism = a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness
deficit ideology = a worldview that explains and justifies outcome inequalities by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities
better get used to it = preparing people for oppression by oppressing them
Name the Systems of Power
- Neoliberalism
- Conservatism
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- Tech Ethics
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Deficit Ideology
- Empire of Normality
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Harm Reduction Theater
#ableism #behaviorism #belonging #betterGetUsedToIt #conqueringGaze #deficitIdeology #deib #diversity #epistemicInjustice #equity #fairness #inclusion #meritocracy #power #resentment #scientism
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DEIB and Their Adversaries
What are diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging? What are their narrative adversaries? We provide a glossary of terms below. Follow the links for deeply sourced reference materials.
DEIB
diversity = a range of differences; variety
equity = the process of redistributing access and opportunity to be fair and just; the state of being free of bias, discrimination, and identity-predictable outcomes and experiences
inclusion = the act of extending fellowship, membership, association, and connection—agnostic of rank, status, gender, race, appearance, intelligence, education, beliefs, values, politics, habits, traditions, language, customs, history, or any other defining characteristic
belonging = the extent to which we feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others; the experience of being at home in ourselves as well as the social, environmental, organizational, and cultural contexts of our lives
Their Adversaries
meritocracy myth = a widely held but false assertion that individual merit is always rewarded; the myth of meritocracy is one of the longest lasting and most dangerous falsehoods in American life
lowering the bar = a racist, sexist, and ableist narrative with no basis in reality that represents diversifying hiring pipelines, attracting candidates from underrepresented groups, and supporting them in the workplace as “lowering the bar” by hiring less-qualified individuals
politics of resentment = manipulations of status anxiety; organization of interest groups based on perceived deprivation or the threat of deprivation
sameness-based fairness = notion of fairness where everyone gets the same thing rather than each getting what they need
fundamental attribution error = to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour
conquering gaze from nowhere= the interpretation of objectivity as neutral and not allowing for participation or stances; an uninvolved, uninvested approach that claims objectivity to “represent while escaping representation”
scientism = the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge
epistemic injustice = where our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity
behaviorism = a dehumanizing mechanism of learning that reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs
ableism = a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness
deficit ideology = a worldview that explains and justifies outcome inequalities by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities
better get used to it = preparing people for oppression by oppressing them
Name the Systems of Power
- Neoliberalism
- Conservatism
- Precarity
- Extractive Abandonment
- Artificial Scarcity
- Collective Risk Shift
- Burnout
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- It’s not DEI’s Fault; It’s the Rot Economy
- Enshittification
- Metric Fixation
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Efficiency
- McNamara Fallacy
- Enshittification
- Objectivity
- When you measure include the measurer.
- Scientism
- Epistemic Injustice
- Scientific Essentialism
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- Conquering Gaze From Nowhere
- Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
- Tech Ethics
- Techno-solutionism
- Technoableism
- Algorithm
- Roaming Autodidact
- Enshittification
- Disability Dongle
- Artificial Intelligence
- Luddite Sensibilities
- Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Deficit Ideology
- Empire of Normality
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Harm Reduction Theater
#ableism #behaviorism #belonging #betterGetUsedToIt #conqueringGaze #deficitIdeology #deib #diversity #epistemicInjustice #equity #fairness #inclusion #meritocracy #power #resentment #scientism
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Are people naturally selfish and lazy?
Or are we built to be collaborative, and self-motivated?
A thread on human nature.
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Are people naturally selfish and lazy?
Or are we built to be collaborative, and self-motivated?
A thread on human nature.
-
Are people naturally selfish and lazy?
Or are we built to be collaborative, and self-motivated?
A thread on human nature.
