Relationships in First and Second Life

It seems that a good fraction of the books I see at Borders deal with either the management of one self or the management of one's relationships to other people.

By "management of" I mean "controlling or influencing or changing the behavior of."

I realize that I've been a perpetual student, probably having taken 200 or more college courses in one thing or another, and yet, I'm trying to think of one lecture at anytime in school, at any age, talking about how to think about and manage my own personal relationships. I'm not recalling any.

This seems curious. Like knowing how to swim, or how to fall without getting hurt, or basic first aid, or basic hygiene, these seem skills everyone needs, a lot, in important, life-changing ways. With the exception of hygiene, and "don't fight in school", all of these are similarly neglected.

In fact, when I think about the named relationships we all know about, there are personal relationships (friend, lover, spouse) blood relationships (mother of, son of, brother of), and power relationships (boss of, coworker, team-mate of , dominant, submissive, superior, inferior), and it sort of stops there. I'm sure I'm missing many and maybe only revealing my ignorance and illiteracy here.

This is not a very rich or robust vocabulary for such an important subject and doesn't facilitate difficult conversations about facets of relationships that could be improved and how to do that.

So, I'm wondering how the virtual reality world Second Life might help us deal with this sort of conversation.

One thing I did learn to do in a recent class, SI689, is at least ask the question: in what way is Second Life "better than being there?" The goal should not be to get up to even with real life, but to tremendously exceed it in some factor or facet.

Let me give just one example. In Second Life (SL) I manage an animated character on the screen, which I come to think of as "me", my avatar -- just as I manage one person and physical body here in real life. I move it, dress it, walk places with it, fly places with it, etc. The flying is "better than real life", as is teleporting almost instantaneously to other locations.

But those are only improvements on real life, not quantum leaps. (The term is absolutely wrong, since that would be the smallest step possible, but you know what I mean: a huge leap.)

So here's more of a quantum leap: One thing I could do in Second Life is to run two different avatars, simultaneously. There is no equivalent in first life. SL doesn't make this easy, although it could.

In fact, lets say that we effectively get two keyboards/joysticks/input-devices: one for my left hand to run one avatar, and one for my right hand to run the other avatar. Let's say I do this a lot, so that, after a while, the motion of my marionette/puppet avatars is automatic and I don't need to think about it, it just "happens" the same way moving my hand happens now.

What exactly would be the effect on "me" to do this, now having two different bodies simultaneously? And more interestingly, how would these two characters "relate" to each other? Say there were times of day when just one or the other of them was active on-line,
to develop a personality and seamless fluency in movement. Each one would develop a certain "personality" as has been discussed elsewhere in the literature.

With some very fancy eye-wear, perhaps the left brain would control one of these dominantly, and the right brain the other. Or at least the mix of dominance would be different. And, again unlike real life, (mostly), one could be, let's say, female and one male. That alters the chemistry and confuses the issue, so for the moment say they are both the same sex as "you" and same gender as "you". (Sex being physiological and gender being behavioral).

Now, here's the key question -- how would or could these two avatars "relate" to each other?
And what could we learn by experimenting with that?

Once, my college apartment mate was looking for a roommate, before selecting me, and he told me he had one main criterion -- if there were two of this person, would they get along with each other? Some people we could think of would fail that test, insisting on being dominant in everything. Some people would be unable to work for themselves as a boss. Interesting.

I'll ponder more about this, and try it out, and report back what I find.

Before I leave it, one last thought on a related subject. Consider learning to play the piano, correctly, with two hands. At one stage of development, each hand has to practice separately.

At a more advanced stage, each hand is playing "at the same time" but it is really coordinated parallel play, the head multiplexing between a fast check left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand.

At a more advanced stage, the hands effectively disappear, and the head is more involved playing, say, two voices -- where the voices may be at one point on separate hands, but could cross over or interweave between fingers on each hand. It is the voices that have life and expression, not the fingers or hands at that point, which are still present but sort of in the background in some way, distant from consciousness.

It makes me wonder if human relationships could be the same way -- initially two consciousnesses, each confined to one body, but ultimately two voices, in some way each
occupying both bodies or spirits. Identities close, then merge, then refactor differently into voices not notes.

This merging and acting with one heart, on spirit, one mind is a key concept to successful sports teams, military teams, work teams, etc.

What words would we use to describe the relationship of the hands at each stage of development? Dominant? Partner?

You see what I mean about the lack of an adequate vocabulary to capture a relationship and describe it to someone else who will know immediately and unambiguously what you mean.

If we can't describe relationships or in some way measure them, even subjectively, how can we possibly take seriously an effort to "improve" them? How would we know if something is "working" or not?

It is an interesting experiment, in Second Life or in real life with just sock puppets -- if this is "you" and this is "the other person", add dialog and show me what a typical discussion over some conflict goes like now, versus how you wish it would go.

Playing both roles simultaneously makes this a more interesting experience, it seems to me.

On things you have to believe to see

Why do people disagree about what they see?

If they disagree does it mean that at least one of them is wrong?

The short answer is that even very competent trained observers are often wrong about what they see, and, in many cases, even if they perform flawlessly, it turns out they are wrong.

And, very importantly, these differences in perception, combined with a lack of understanding of the causes of them, have led to many arguments, battles, and probably entire literal wars.

And, has been so well captured in Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, totally new paradigms are often strongly ridiculed and not "seen", let alone "obvious" to the vast majority of competent scholars early in the lifetime of the idea.

And, from long experience with the insidious impact of unconscious bias, even among very highly trained researchers, the standard in medicine is a "double blind" study, to get around the well known tendency to see what we expect to see, or to see what we want to see - or not to see things that would be very painful if seen. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
describes extensive case studies of how things scientists were sure were true about humans have proven to be patently false.

Human vision is a very tricky thing, swayed by peer-group pressure, swayed by biases from fears and desires and prior experience and conditioning, subject to numerous kinds of reproducible errors at best. Yet, it is good enough for us to get by, mostly.

I do not share the view of those who swing the pendulum to the far side, and therefore claim that
"nothing can be known" or that anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's, "because it's all relative and subjective" anyway. Even Einstein, so often misquoted, showed that with the corrections and adjustments he proposed, the seemingly conflicting views of two observers could be in fact perfectly reconciled.

We do not know and cannot see "everything", and at the same time, we do know and can see "something" -- the truth is in that inconvenient middle ground.

Some improvements can be made by multiple observers working together. Again there are traps and pitfalls, such as "Group Think", or tyranny of the majority, and suppression of minority or inconvenient views, but the truth is neither pure white nor pure black.

Because humans heavily use their visual processing circuitry to do "thinking", and attempt to "see" things meaning "understand them", the failure modes of this circuitry are of interest to us all. Further, humans tend to put strong judgmental values on top of what they perceive as "true" or "obvious" - so social action often follows from such broken vision.

Furthermore, groups of humans tend to influence each-other's perceptions in invisible ways, so that the entire collection of them, starting perhaps with one undecided state, can break into "camps" each seeing something different more and more as time evolves. Differences from other "camps" are viewed as some kind of enemy action, further suppressing rational discussion. Once very widely held, these mistaken views latch in and lock down, and b ecome shared norms and prejudices, filtering further information gathering to only support themselves and there becoming self-supporting, and, in fact, attacking efforts to dislodge the majority error.

Most of this, it turns out, is really a function of perception, and is as true of robots trying to "see" something as it is of humans.

What do we make then of a person who "see things" in a way different from our own? Or a person who sees entire things we don't even see at all, and don't believe are there? Are they to be considered "crazy" or "heretics"?

The human visual system has both feedback and feed-forward, and learns over time. As a consequence, things that we really need to see, we can often learn to see easily. A botanist, glancing at a plant, or a professional IT person, glancing at software, can often see a huge amount that a layperson cannot see at all, even when instructed where to look. We don't have to train our eyes, they figure out we need to see stuff and show it to us dynamically better with time.

But this system in humans is linked into the pleasure seeking and pain avoiding systems as well. Some views or perceptions are essentially certain to lead to painful memories, or to actions that will produce pain and have produced pain in the past, and our visual systems happily and automatically reshuffle neurons so that the painful perceptions and conflict is reduced. Often, the systems reduce pain to zero by making certain perceptions simply impossible for us to see any more. If we're not testing for this, we can easily miss the effect.

So, for example, if a person feels extremely insecure and vulnerable, their perceptual system may figure out that most complexity or harshness causes intolerable pain, and may decide, on its own, to shut off perception of complexity or threats. The person has been moved, by their visual system, into a very simplified world where nothing is complex and everything is safe, despite what others see. At the extreme, we classify such people as "mentally ill", but most of the intermediate states -- inability to cope with complexity -- simply turn into types of "political" viewpoints where simplistic, black and white views of the world are desperately clung to and become self-righteously self-reinforcing by blocking out all contrary information and often blocking out all those who disagree with the conclusions as being "enemies".

There are many counter-measures we can take, such as pooling notes, or all agreeing that we should be polite to those who disagree with us or espouse contrary opinions, and hear them out. The trend these days in the USA seems to be to shout them down, not to hear them out, however.

On a personal or team or department or national level, providing a forum for different "sides" and hearing out each other, where possible can avoid many errors we would later regret. This too, the essence of civilized discourse, is out of vogue in the US, where even allowing the impression of uncertainty is considered a sign of "weakness" and inappropriate in a "leader".

The literature of high-reliability systems is clear that suppression of dissenting opinions is a fast path to disaster, but this result is not widely understood, even if known.

I think it is probably correct, although not necessarily "safe" to say, that at least half of what each of us believes to be "obviously true" is, in fact, not true. The problem is, we don't know which half. And, most adults are not very happy to have one of their errors pointed out to them.

Trained and practiced collaboration in a psychologically safe environment can get around most of these problems, but is hard to do and not taught in school. Most "meetings" of "committees" at work are not best characterized as a sincere and loving search for the truth amid seemingly conflicting interests and viewpoints.

Despite the dismal track record, it is still possible to actually get consultation to work, if properly facilitated, and always worth it.

Many of the current catastrophes in the news could have been avoided entirely if widespread consultation was the norm. People would not have bought into ridiculous mortgages, for example, if they had consulted with the community first.

Why and how we have ended up at a point where asking for advice from our own people's experts, whatever people those are, is no longer "cool" is a topic for another day. Part of it is certainly tied up with a definition of "male behavior" that approves driving around for an hour lost instead of stopping to ask directions, and larger scale analogs to that activity on a departmental, corporate, state, or national level.

The title of this post, "On things you have to believe to see", is a reference to a phenomenon in machine-vision known as "model-based perception" -- which is in turn modeled after how humans perceive their visual and audio stream of data that floods their brain.

There is always way more information than can be processed by the fastest processor, much of it ambiguous or supporting conflicting interpretations, and much of the important part being of lower volume than the noise.

In response to that machines (and humans) simplify life by holding an internal mental model of the world until they can hold it no longer, and filtering the fire-hose of data down to that which resolves along the axes of that simplistic model, discarding everything else.

The good news is that, if the model is correct, or nearly correct, this approach discards the noise and keeps the signal, making life good.

The bad news is that the very same stream of data could support hundreds of thousands of interpretations equally well, and the one we have may not be even close to the best interpretation of the data.

However, any model at least lets us operate and make decisions quickly, and get feedback if we are wrong -- and in the real world, that approach usually works far better than the "paralysis of analysis" and attempting to understand everything all the time.

As thousands of studies have shown, we will tend to see what we are looking for, and tend to suppress contrary information. A radiologist, asked to look at an X-ray of a chest, will see different things if asked "Is this a tumor?" than if asked "what do you see here?" Which one is the better question "depends."

Another thing that is fatal to animals and humans, aside from inability to operate quickly, is inability to hold a course of action -- ie, dithering, or continually second-guessing an opinion. Our brains automatically try to avoid that, once we have formed a perhaps arbitrary decision, by selectively showing us data that support that decision, and selectively masking out or hiding data that contradict it. The result is, even if we are wrong, at least we are self-consistent for a while.

Confidently taking the wrong exit off the expressway is probably safer than continually changing lanes as one tries to decide if this is the right exit or not. The problem in most cases will become obvious later, and be sorted out then.

Is it a good thing that we are blind to and oblivious of our own frailty of perception and judgment? Probably, in many cases, we can at least operate at all if we act as if we knew what we were doing.

The downside is that misconceptions, errors, bias, prejudice, and hatred can all become self-fulfilling features of our lives all due to inability to perceive correctly what is going on around us, as well as due to the harsh way we often treat those whose views are contrary to our own, or foreign, or incomprehensible to us, or "clearly wrong."

This mishmash of human emotions, behaviors, perceptions, and prejudices, and norms regarding them is part of the culture that has to be over-ridden in order to establish a "lean", Toyota-Production System type high-reliability operation. To get high quality, reliable product out the back door, we need to have a psychologically safe, humble, listening culture at the front, where it's safe to say "I don't know" or "Can anyone help me?" or safe to say "Er, excuse me Doctor, I realize you are sure of your own viewpoint, but aren't we doing the LEFT arm today?"

We override such civilized culture only at high risk of taking the wrong exit, the wrong arm, or the wrong war needlessly.