#pragmatism — Public Fediverse posts

Farmers and ranchers to have the RIGHT RETUREND TO THEM to process their own produce and sell it

And consumers will have the right to buy that food RETURNED TO THEM. These rights do not belong to the government. Growing and selling your own food is an inalienable right. Period. ABN

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

link

Maybe it’s just me, but I have always thought these findings were extremely obvious. What is obvious is not just facial expressions. The same rough analysis applies to tone of voice, word choice, gesture, body language, perceived meaning, pragmatics of speaking and everything else involving interpersonal communication. For these reasons, I developed the FIML technique. FIML reduces the ‘irreducible complexity’1 of human interactions by examining small bits of interpersonal communications in real-time, real-world situations. Perfect communication between two humans (the smallest unit) is not possible. BUT, much better communication IS. FIML is not hard to do if you have a good partner who can understand why it is necessary. The world is a lonely place and good partners are rare mainly because interpersonal human understanding is really bad, frightfully so. If you do FIML, everything will be better for you. ABN

1. See A theory of FIML ↩︎

A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

EXPEDIENCY, n. The father of all virtues.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Expediency,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1884-06-07)

More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/85383…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #convenience #excuse #expediency #justification #opportunism #pragmatism #rationale #selfinterest #selfjustification #virtue

This is a classic Plains Indian burial scaffold — a raised platform of poles built so the dead could rest above the earth, out of reach of wolves and scavengers, and closer to the sky — WindTalker

Many of the great tribes of the northern and central Plains practiced this form of aerial burial. The Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota (Sioux), Crow, Cheyenne, Mandan, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Gros Ventre all used it at different times and in different places. When suitable trees were available, bodies were sometimes placed high in the branches instead. The same idea guided both methods.

The body was carefully wrapped in robes, blankets, or skins and laid on the platform, often with the person’s most important belongings: weapons, tools, a favorite pipe, food, tobacco. Sometimes the heads and tails of horses were fastened to the poles so the spirit would have mounts for the journey. Orientation mattered. Crow people commonly placed the feet toward the east. Mandan often directed them southeast, toward the old country around the Heart River.

The reasons were both practical and spiritual. In winter the ground could freeze solid for feet. Wolves and dogs would dig up shallow graves. A scaffold kept the body clean and intact while the spirit made its way. Relatives could still visit, speak to the dead, and leave offerings. Some groups later collected the cleaned bones for secondary burial in the earth, in rock crevices, or in special places near the village. The Mandan arranged the bleached skulls in careful circles on the prairie.
Nineteenth-century travelers recorded these scenes in detail.

Karl Bodmer’s famous 1830s image of a Sioux chief’s funeral scaffold near Fort Pierre remains one of the clearest visual records. Later photographs from Crow and Dakota country show the same quiet platforms standing alone on open ground.

This was never a single uniform custom across all Native peoples. It belonged especially to the mobile horse cultures of the grasslands, where the horizon was wide and the relationship between the living, the dead, and the open sky was close. The scaffolds were temporary homes for the body while the spirit traveled on.

link

Respect if she does it

link

A quotation from Bertrand Russell

I think the gist of the matter is that a saint can live without politeness, and indeed that politeness is incompatible with a saintly character. But the man who is always to be sincere must be free from spite and envy and malice and pettiness. Most of us have a dose of these vices in our composition and therefore have to excerise tact to avoid giving offence. We cannot all be saints, and if saintliness is impossible, we may at least try not to be too disagreeable.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Essay (1933-02-01) “On Tact,” New York American

More about this quote: wist.info/russell-bertrand/601…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #bertrandrussell #compensation #diplomacy #disagreeability #friction #imperfection #offense #politeness #pragmatism #prudence #saint #sincerity #tact #virtue

A quotation from C. C. Colton

He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men will know how things are.

Charles Caleb "C. C." Colton (1780-1832) English cleric, writer, aphorist
Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Vol. 1, Preface (1820)

More about this quote: wist.info/colton-charles-caleb…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #cccolton #books #humanism #humanities #idealism #ideals #pragmatism #realism #realworld #humannature #humancondition

https://theconversation.com/politicians-now-talk-of-climate-pragmatism-to-delay-action-new-study-264317; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-025-03987-4 (open access). For #climate #pragmatism, read climate #denialism, @GeraldKutney. #Badenoch & the #Tories are serving the interests of the #fossilfuel industry, not those of the #people or the #planet.

A quotation from Thoreau

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed of them.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American philosopher and writer
Journal (1852-07-14)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/thoreau-henry-david/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #thoreau #aging #ambition #aspirations #dreams #gettingold #grandiosity #growingold #maturity #meme #middleage #practicality #pragmatism #youth

3. #Pragmatism: An emphasis on workable #PracticleSolutions rather than #Ideological purity. People who follow #PurpleLite tend to focus on what works in practice, even if it means blending ideas from across the #PoliticalSpectrum.

3. #Pragmatism: An emphasis on workable #PracticleSolutions rather than #Ideological purity. People who follow #PurpleLite tend to focus on what works in practice, even if it means blending ideas from across the #PoliticalSpectrum.

#ThemeOneProgram • #SurveyPage
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/06/12/survey-of-theme-one-program-4/

A program I worked on all through the 80s aimed to develop #Algorithms and #DataStructures for integrating #EmpiricalLearning and #LogicalReasoning. I had earlier developed programs for #Learning #TwoLevelFormalLanguages and for #PropositionalLogic #ConstraintSatisfaction based on C.S. #Peirce's #LogicalGraphs. Getting those 2 faculties to work together meant integrating the ways of #Empiricism and #Rationalism.

#ThemeOneProgram #Learning #Reasoning
#Logic #LogicalGraphs #FormalLanguages
#Algorithm #DataStructure #GraphTheory
#Peirce #PragmaticSemioticInformation
#Empiricism #Rationalism #Pragmatism
#ModelTheory #ProofTheory #Semiotics
#ParallelDistributedProcessing #PDP
#Grossberg #McClelland #Rumelhart